Oracle unveils Blockchain Cloud Service

Oracle on Tuesday confirmed the launch of 'Blockchain Cloud Service' to financial and government services globally, including India.

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.

In a statement, the company said Arab Jordan Investment Bank, 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.

Besides providing customers with a development platform to build their own networks, and to quickly integrate with Oracle software-as-a-service (SaaS), the Oracle "Blockchain Cloud Service" helps them to deploy third-party applications they already use and other Blockchain networks and Oracle platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services.

Blockchain has the power to fundamentally transform how every industry does business by making interactions more secure, transparent, efficient and cost-effective.

It also enables users to provision blockchain networks, join other organisations, 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.

Oracle Cloud Platform Executive Vice President Amit Zavery said Blockchain promises to be one of the most transformative technologies of our generation.

“We are excited to announce the availability of Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service. It 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," said Zavery.

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 India Head-Solution Consulting Vaibhav Gawde said in the digital economy, companies still relying on semi-automated, manual transaction processes find it harder to establish/retain trust of their business stakeholders, as such processes carry greater risk of errors and frauds.

"More and more Indian businesses are contemplating the use of distributed ledger technology such as blockchain to overcome this trust challenge and ensure regulatory compliance, especially where they are dealing with/managing contractual relationships. Along with faster, more secure transactions, blockchain enables businesses to increase operational efficiencies, improve cost effectiveness and engage customers better," he said.

"Though blockchain has seen a lot of initial success in the financial sector, it’s quickly gaining ground in other sectors - from healthcare to the public sector, oil & gas to the education space. While many Indian customers are already a part of our early adopter program, we’re now making this service available to our larger customer base," he said.

Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service is an Oracle-managed cloud platform backed by a 99.95% availability SLA, with built-in high availability configuration, autonomous recovery agents, as well as continuous ledger backup capabilities that can enable multi-datacenter disaster recovery across availability domains.

It further benefits from broad capabilities in 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," said Parker.

Blockchain has the power to impact almost all industries and has applicability to verticals from transportation, supply chain and logistics, energy, retail and ecommerce, 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.

“We are using Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service to develop an application to help simplify the complex documentation processes that plague the shipping industry,” said Steve Siu, CEO, CargoSmart.

“Its comprehensive nature has allowed us to quickly turn prototypes into viable products in several 12-week sprints and so far, we have seen proven productivity gains of more than 30 percent compared to other blockchain platforms we tested. Another key purchasing requirement were its integrated management and operations tools, which allow business partners to monitor all of their blockchain activities and the health of the network," Siu.