In the short term, Oracle is to launch its new blockchain products: a platform-as-a-service product and decentralized ledger-based applications.

The world’s second largest software company Oracle Corp. has announced its plans to launch blockchain products just in the nearest future. Already this month the company will start its new blockchain journey, joining the constantly expanding group of companies that provide products based on the digital-ledger technology behind Bitcoin.

According to Thomas Kurian, president of product development of this California-based company, they are going to launch a platform-as-a-service blockchain product in May and to introduce decentralized ledger-based applications in June.

Blockchain today is widely implemented in dozens of different areas and its popularity is rather clear given the nature of this technology. Thanks to distribution of data across thousands of computers over the internet, it helps to minimize risks that can be brought by information kept by a single centre or entity, for example, a cloud-computing provider.

Oracle cooperates with Banco de Chile with a view to carry out inter-bank transactions on a hyperledger. The company is also said to have established collaboration with the government of Nigeria that is working on application of blockchain technology for documenting customs and import duties.

It is also expected that Oracle’s products will be used by pharmaceutical companies. Oracle’s developments can be very useful for medicine supply chains management.

In October, Oracle launched its the enterprise-grade blockchain cloud platform. At that time the company considered blockchain to be a technology that would contribute to promoting and extending its existing cloud services. Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service was designed with an aim to provide clients with an opportunity to enhance the speed of all their business processes as well as to reduce costs and risks.

Nevertheless, the company has a number of serious competitors. As today under the continuously growing popularity of cryptocurrencies, more and more software companies are working on utilizing of the blockchain ledger model with a view to facilitate all transactions and operations.

Another software giant Microsoft has announced a release of a new set of tools for its Azure platform. These tools can be of use for developers working with distributed ledger tech as they are aimed at making blockchain app development simpler.

According to the company’s official blog post, Azure Blockchain Workbench is “a new offering that can reduce application development time from months to days”. “Workbench gets customers started quickly by automating infrastructure setup, so developers can focus on application logic, and business owners can focus on defining and validating their use cases.”

But it is not the first platform of that kind. In April, Amazon introduced its Amazon Web Services Blockchain Templates that are also aimed at making all the processes for developers working with blockchain networks easier and faster. Thanks to this project it is possible to focus only on development of blockchain-based applications and not to spend time on setting up the entire blockchain network manually. There are also some developments in this sphere by IBM and Huawei among others.