Guardium partners with 0chain

I’ve been in tech a long time and just like fashion technology typically runs in cycles. Trends rise and fall and then rise again… lather rinse and repeat. Every other decade or so we see some major leaps forward that establish a new cycle.

I’m not breaking any new ground saying that the current rise of cryptocurrency and blockchain is a significant event in technology and in some regards culturally. The words blockchain & cryptocurrency are the easiest for most people to pick out as the most prominent markers of this time period in tech.

When I started in tech in the late 90s I witnessed the rise of the fledgling web companies I also saw many of them fail in the great tech crash of 2000/2001. While many people might cite the hype and questionable economics of this environment as the stand-out events of this timeframe. For those of us building those companies (regardless of their success/failure) we witnessed a quiet revolution that fundamentally changed tech for the next two decades.

Simply speaking; infrastructure became democratized, affordable and flat-out easier to implement. When I started my career it was not uncommon to walk into a typical mid-size company and witness racks of expensive proprietary hardware stashed away within the “IT room”. These were the days of Novell and Windows NT 4.0 ruling the enterprise desktop and neither had much in the way of serious technology focused on what we now define as web applications (note: Microsoft IIS in that era was a fledgling feature). Brands like Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Alpha and HP defined high-performance and were the default solutions when you wanted to launch your company’s web presence or build otherwise mission critical infrastructure.

Then something changed… a little group called RedHat started packaging a Linux distribution that was rapidly gaining adoption on (gasp) basic x86 hardware. Almost instantly we’d moved from purchasing $20,000+ (USD) Sun Microsystem machines and SGI rack-mount servers to building our own systems on commodity Pentium Pro, Pentium II and the then newly launched Intel Xeon processors.

Instead of paying for expensive UNIX variants we were now using an obscure alternative called Linux… for free nonetheless. In terms of enterprise computing this was heresy as $$$$$$ equaled credibility in the eyes of many executives at that time. That notion slowly changed as we proved that commodity hardware was not only less expensive but it was more flexible and eventually became much more capable than the proprietary UNIX systems we’d been purchasing.