Blockchain will evolve further in the next two to three years among the enterprises as it has become one of their top five priorities, an Oracle executive said.
Blockchain is another way to store data transactions to manage it, enquire it, protect it and store it securely.
While blockchain can greatly streamline many existing processes surrounding supply chain, identity, cross-border payments, and fraud detection, Frank Xiong, group vice-president of blockchain product development at Oracle, told TechRadar Middle East that supply chain management will grow faster as there is less regulation than the financial sector.
According to research firm Gartner, lack of interoperability standards will prevent pervasive blockchain deployment across financial services ecosystems for at least three years.
Standards are critical for financial services entities because they are constantly moving assets between clients, partners and other institutions.
Different blockchain platforms
There are numerous blockchain platforms such as Corda, Hyperledger and Digital Asset, or the public blockchain standards like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, EOS and Tezos.
Xiong said that Oracle is committed to stay with the Hyperledger community by leveraging new releases and contributing to the open-source community.
Fabio Chesini, senior research director at Gartner, said that the blockchain standards for financial services companies are three to five years until standards mature and settle.
In the next two to three years, Gartner analysts expect all major ERP [enterprise resource planning] and CRM [customer relationship management] players to offer blockchain capabilities as an add-on feature for their software and SaaS products
“Blockchain is critical to Oracle. Oracle is a data management company and blockchain has a table in the database set,” he said.
Last year, Oracle announced a cloud version of the blockchain platform and recently it released an enterprise edition of the blockchain platform which allows customers to install the platform on their data centres.
Strong adoption
While blockchain can greatly streamline many existing processes surrounding supply chain, identity, cross-border payments, and fraud detection, businesses have struggled to implement blockchain networks within their existing ecosystems.
According to The Insight Partners, the global blockchain market was valued at $1.57b in 2018 and is expected to reach $162.84b by 2027 with an annual growth rate of 68.1% in the forecast period from 2019 to 2027.
Oracle has joined other big cloud players such as IBM, SAP and Microsoft by offering blockchain-as-a-service for companies to deploy the distributed ledger technology.
Currently, Oracle has eight cloud centres worldwide running the blockchain platform - two in the US, two in Europe, one each in Japan, Toronto, South Korea and Mumbai.
So far, Xiong said that Oracle has more than 150 customers and running more than 400 trials.
“We do have a hybrid blockchain model for data centre and cloud to meet customer’s needs,” he said.
