Oracle Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform, Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service, which was built on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric in October of last year, is now generally available to corporate clients. The subscription-based service aims to help businesses track goods transparently and securely through supply chains on a global scale and make cross-border payments with ease.
Oracle said in a press release that the new offering provides customers with a ready-to-use infrastructure to build and manage their own blockchain networks, and to quickly integrate with Oracle’s pre-built applications they already use, as well as other blockchain networks and Oracle Platform-as-a-Service products. It also enables customers to provision their own blockchain networks and then let Oracle manage the network, and to build and deploy smart contracts on top of the platform.
Oracle Cloud Platform executive vice president Amit Zavery said:
“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.”
So far, the beta version of the product has been used in recent months by a range of organizations, including Solar Site Design, CargoSmart, Arab Jordan Investment Bank, Indian Oil, Nigeria Customs, Intelipost, Sofbang, among others. Solar Site Design, for instance, is a solar energy equipment provider that has been using the blockchain offering to track solar energy usage and the promotional rewards it offers.
Meanwhile, Arab Jordan Investment Bank is using the service to streamline their electronic fund transfers while the shipping enterprise CargoSmart has been using it to digitize the process of tracking shipments and deliveries within the entire supply chain. Another customer, Certified Origins, an olive oil producer, has been piloting Oracle Blockchain-as-a-Service platform to improve the traceability of its olives ‘from the tree to the shelf’.
Oracle Cloud Service is built on top of Hyperledger Fabric, a blockchain framework implementation developed by IBM and now maintained by the non-profit Linux Foundation. Oracle said their BaaS service is pre-assembled with underlying infrastructure dependencies, container lifecycle management, identity management, event services, REST proxy, and a number of operations and monitoring tools integrated under a single console.
Additionally, Oracle BaaS service is backed by a 99.95 percent availability SLA, and includes constant ledger backup capabilities that can enable multi-datacenter recovery across domains. It offers expansive integrations with Oracle Cloud Platform for API management, application integration, and application development.
While blockchain technology has the potential to help digitize and restructure business processes, the penetration rate still remains at less than 1 percent across industries. The technology has proved to be too complex for individual firms to develop or implement as there are security and consistency issues that make it difficult to integrate the technology into their existing IT systems.
Oracles blockchain service, though similar to VeChain, and Microsoft’s Azure Workbench, could help streamline supply chain and transaction efficiency and help drive widespread adoption of blockchain by enterprises.
Post a Comment