Some of the world’s most ambitious technology innovators have taken a huge step forward in fulfilling their blockchain ambitions after deploying an early adopter version of the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service.
The service allows organisations to easily build blockchain networks to drive more secure and efficient transactions and to track goods through supply chains on a global scale.
Arab Jordan Investment Bank is the standout adopter from the Middle East region, while firms including CargoSmart, Certified Origins, Indian Oil, Intelipost, MTO, Neurosoft, Nigeria Customs, Sofbang, Solar Site Design and TradeFin are among the many global organisations that already have adopted Oracle’s blockchain platform.
Blockchain has the power to fundamentally transform how every industry does business by making interactions more secure, transparent, efficient and cost-effective.
The Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service provides customers with a development platform to build their own networks, and to quickly integrate with Oracle SaaS and third-party applications they already use, as well as other blockchain networks and Oracle PaaS services.
It also enables users to provision blockchain networks, join other organizations, and deploy and run smart contracts to update and query the ledger. Oracle’s Blockchain platform leverages the company’s decades of experience across industries and its extensive partner ecosystem to reliably share and conduct trusted transactions with suppliers, banks, and other trade partners through blockchain.
“Blockchain promises to be one of the most transformative technologies of our generation,” said Amit Zavery, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Platform. “The Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service is the result of years of R&D alongside our valued partners and customers. With Oracle’s platform, enterprises can enhance their business, eliminate unnecessary processes, and transact with their distributed networks more easily, transparently and securely than ever before.”
Oracle’s blockchain platform is built on top of The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric. It is pre-assembled with all the underlying infrastructure dependencies, container lifecycle management, event services, identity management, REST proxy, and a number of operations and monitoring tools integrated under a single console, expediting the set-up and application development process.
Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service is an Oracle-managed cloud platform backed by a 99.95 percent availability SLA, with built-in high availability configuration, autonomous recovery agents, as well as continuous ledger backup capabilities that can enable multi-data centre disaster recovery across availability domains.
It further benefits from broad capabilities in the Oracle Cloud Platform for plug-and-play integration with existing cloud and on-premises applications, API management, and application development environments and tools. Additionally, Oracle is delivering new SaaS applications to use blockchain technology for common use cases, such as track and trace, provenance identification, warranty and usage, and cold chain.
The plug-and-play ability with Oracle and third-party applications results in faster integration with diverse systems of record; greatly accelerating time to market and multiplying the returns from using the blockchain platform across different application use cases.
“Blockchain projects are quickly moving from pilot to production as enterprises and governments begin to see the inherent value of distributed ledgers and smart contracts,” said Robert Parker, group vice president of manufacturing and retail insights, IDC. “As spending accelerates, buyers will need an enterprise class platform beyond open source that includes data security and integrity, scalability, manageability, and interoperability.”
Blockchain has the power to impact almost all industries, and has applicability to verticals from transportation, supply chain and logistics, energy, retail and e-commerce, to financial services, telecommunications and public sector.
Organisations and industry consortia are already using Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service to help ease transactions, track goods through supply chains, and reduce costs, including global shipping leaders, multi-national manufacturers, food producers and energy marketplaces. For example, Oracle joined the Food Safety Consortium and is a member of The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, participating in its working group on blockchain.
“Oracle’s blockchain platform has helped us minimise the complexity of electronic fund transfers by reducing cost, increasing efficiency and security levels, and ultimately improving the overall customer experience,” said Ayman Qadoumi, A. deputy general manager, information technology and security, Arab Jordan Investment Bank. “The built-in features such as identity management and data encryption made it an ideal choice given our industry requirements and compliance needs. Additionally, the REST APIs helped us and our vendors accelerate application development and integration with existing core services.”
“We are using Oracle’s blockchain cloud service to develop an application to help simplify the complex documentation processes that plague the shipping industry,” said Steve Siu, CEO, CargoSmart. “The comprehensive nature of Oracle’s blockchain cloud platform has allowed us to quickly build prototypes into viable products in several 12-week sprints. So far, we have seen proven productivity gains of over 30% as compared to the other blockchain platforms we tried. Fulfilling other key purchasing requirements are the integrated management and operations tools, which allow our business partners to monitor all of their blockchain activities and the health of the network.”
“As the producer of extra virgin olive oil from fruits grown in small family farms in Italy, we wanted to trace our product that we sell in the US market branded Bellucci Evoo across the entire supply chain -‘from the tree to the shelf,’” said Andrea Biagianti, CIO of Certified Origins. “The availability of Oracle’s blockchain service simplifies the implementation and collaboration of all parties included, and represents a real competitive advantage for us. It adds a further level of transparency and information that is valuable for consumers looking for quality products and helps us to support the excellence of the small farms.”
Dr. Terence Lau, convener of the Food Safety Consortium (FSC), welcomed Oracle as a Corporate Member of the non-profit technology development platform established by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. “FSC is committed in advancing global food safety with science and technology,” said Dr Lau. “With an increasing demand on multidisciplinary expertise in tackling challenges in food safety and quality, FSC is delighted to partner with Oracle to leverage blockchain, big data, and other IT applications to provide better food provenance, tracking and safety. We look forward to exploring Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service to improve and accelerate the Food Safety initiative in Hong Kong, as well as globally.”
“Companies are increasingly testing and seeing the value blockchain technologies can offer their organisations, from streamlining internal processes to building trusted networks with partners, customers and third parties,” said Brian Behlendorf, executive director, Hyperledger. “Based on Hyperledger Fabric, Oracle’s platform, with its support for interoperability with non-Oracle Hyperledger Fabric instances, will help build further support for open standards and interoperability, while illustrating how quickly, easily and securely businesses can begin utilising blockchain to improve business processes.”
“Oracle’s blockchain platform is agile, easy to develop on and its enterprise-grade scalability makes it an ideal choice for deploying blockchain platforms rapidly,” said Juan José Miranda, blockchain project manager, Magia.Digital. “Based on our experience with the platform, we even chose it as our main development platform for the New York Consensus’ Hackathon 2018. With its features, we were able to impress the judges and ultimately be named winner of the contest.”
“Once we decided that blockchain would be the ideal technology to help bring our ‘From Mileage to Opportunity’ – M2O – loyalty program to life, we went through a rigorous approach to find the right vendor,” said Suwan Kim, CEO, MTO. “We were confident that Oracle’s pre-assembled blockchain cloud service could quickly help us realise a trusted platform that empowers users to convert credit card points and air miles to tokens. It also provides us with easy, ongoing management and all the underlying security, scalability, and resilience that are needed for a production solution like this.”
“We used Oracle’s blockchain to build a trusted platform for the automation of Customs Excise Trade business processes and procedures,” said Aber T Benjamin, assistant comptroller general modernisation, Nigeria Customs Service. “Using this technology, we found the entire business environment can be migrated to blockchain to automate processes and create transparency and predictability. Once the transition to blockchain is completed, NCS expects revenue growth increase of about 50 percent. This technology helps our organisation to build global trust for Nigerian businesses through irrefutable data on goods manufactured in the country.”
“Using Oracle’s blockchain platform in factoring and supply chain finance seems a natural fit that enables us to go from a fragmented process along heterogeneous systems to a common base, that can be trusted by all, used as a reference, resolve conflicts and streamline processes,” said Nikolaos Vasilonikolidakis, CEO, Neurosoft. “Risk mitigation in factoring is paramount and Oracle’s blockchain brings common consensus that helps settle transactions in near real-time.”
“Oracle’s blockchain platform is enabling Sofbang to build smart contract supply chain solutions for our customers,” said Michael Ribet, product development manager, Sofbang. “We’re delighted with the rich functionality, robust scalability of the service and how it’s designed to integrate blockchain technology with current business critical applications seamlessly. Our customers are anticipating up to 35 percent efficiency gains by communicating more reliably and rapidly with their trading partners through Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service.”
“We helped found the Energy Blockchain Network earlier this year after realising stakeholders in the solar project ecosystem needed a single source of truth with immutable records, so they can trust project status data,” said Jason Loyet, CEO of Solar Site Design. “We can now program each project’s status, list requirements to move forward, and rewards value contributions in near real-time. We are really happy with how easily NetSuite SuiteCloud Development Platform and Oracle‘s blockchain platform integrate with pre-packaged blockchain APIs, allowing us to explore new ways to develop smart contracts, manage the projects and reward programs.”
“As a company dedicated to making business-to-business payments and supply chain finance secure, frictionless and ubiquitous using blockchain, we are able to significantly accelerate the time to onboard corporations, their suppliers and banks by using Oracle’s blockchain platform,” said Amit Baid, CEO, TradeFin. “It provides a REST API-driven platform with rich integration options in Oracle Cloud Platform, allowing us to quickly onboard existing customers. Additionally, Oracle Scaleup Ecosystem provides access to the platform itself, cloud credits, mentoring, and a number of Oracle resources that can help start-ups like ours grow quickly.”
