Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) embarked on the blockchain journey in November 2015, a year and a half after CEO Satya Nadella unveiled his vision to emerge as a preferred cloud platform in the “mobile-first, cloud-first, data-powered world.” Microsoft’s offering of “Blockchain as a Service (BaaS)” on Microsoft Azure was started to enable enterprise clients and developers have a single-click cloud-based blockchain developer environment.
During these two years, Microsoft have made meaningful progress. Here's a look at some of the work they did during 2017 in terms of blockchain application, expanding partnerships and offering solutions.
Interesting Uses For Blockchain Around The World
Microsoft and Mojix collaborated to enable blockchain-powered smart contracts to create swifter supply chains that can lower overall business costs, foster closer cooperation and enhance trust among retailers, suppliers, and logistic partners. This was followed by its alliance with Tierion for a service that generates, manages, and validates attestations. Tierion is one of the organizations that is part of Microsoft’s “decentralized identity initiative.”
An important step towards “making digital identity a reality” was made as Accenture and Microsoft joined hands to provide a blockchain solution to support the ID2020 program, a public-private partnership dedicated to solving the challenges of identity for deprived people through technology. It is estimated that about one-sixth of the worldwide population is denied basic rights due to the lack of documented proof of their existence.
In this light, it is imperative to include every individual onto a tamper-proof system and ensure their existence is acknowledged and they get their rightful due.
In June, BankChain, a consortium of banks in India (including the State Bank of India and ICICI Bank) collaborated with Microsoft for using Azure Blockchain as the underlying blockchain platform. Under the partnership, the entities involved will work together to develop various blockchain use cases, including projects related to Know Your Customer (KYC), anti-money laundering, and countering the financing of terrorism.
Meanwhile, an interesting prototype for a digital car maintenance book by leveraging the power of Blockchain technology was announced by Groupe Renault in association with Microsoft and VISEO in July. Under the existing systems, information about customers and their vehicles is spread across automakers, insurers, repair shops, and other entities. This will change with the introduction of a new digital car maintenance book wherein all the relevant information will be stored in a secured, tamper-proof and transparent manner.
In addition, Utilidex worked with Microsoft UK to develop an initial proof of concept to test application of blockchain in buying and selling energy.
In September, EY and Guardtime announced the world’s first blockchain platform for the marine insurance sector in partnership with A.P. Møller-Maersk A/S, ACORD, Microsoft, MS Amlin, Willis Towers Watson and XL Catlin. This platform will be used to deploy the benefits of blockchain for end-to-end use across the marine industry. Currently, the marine insurance industry is very complex involving multiple parties across borders, long paper chains, high transaction volumes and significant levels of reconciliations, resulting in issues related to compliance, duplication and delays. The use of blockchain is aimed at mitigating all of those issues.
But Is Blockchain Ready for Enterprise Use?
Microsoft actively identifies existing technology gaps with blockchain and helps organizations build durable enterprise-grade applications.
In May, Azure introduced a new blockchain framework to reduce the time and cost associated with blockchain Proof of Concept (PoC) projects. Microsoft identified that a significant amount of time (8-12 weeks) and cost (as much as $300,000) was involved in developing a blockchain PoC, and this was resulting in huge missed opportunity, and thus Microsoft has been working to overcome such challenges.
In another step to bringing blockchain to the enterprise, Microsoft unveiled the Coco Framework in August 2017. Coco Framework reduces the complexities involved in the development techniques while offering high-transaction speed (more than 1600 transactions per second), distributed governance and confidentiality—much needed ingredients for successful commercial adoption of blockchain.
Other Partnerships
Microsoft has joined hands with leading industry consortiums to understand core industry scenarios and customer requirements better. During the year, Microsoft joined Enterprise Ethereum Alliance as a launch partner whileR3 and Microsoft expanded their strategic partnership to further accelerate adoption of R3’s Corda platform among businesses using Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft become a member of IC3, the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts in September. It also collaborated with Waves, a platform that functions primarily to allow easy creation and distribution, trading and asset exchange, and leveraging a blockchain backend.
Microsoft Azure has been supporting Ethereum blockchain since the beginning and over time it has extended support to a number of distributed ledger protocols, including HyperLedger Fabric, R3 Corda, Quorum, Chain Core, and BlockApps.
Final Word
Theglobal marketfor blockchain stands at $708 million in 2017, and it is anticipated to reach $60.7 billion by 2024. This is a huge opportunity for companies like Microsoft, IBM and Accenture which are heavily committed to bringing blockchain in real-world use. Microsoft is powering the blockchain trend as its enterprise clients are making a transition to cloud services and blockchain on Azure. Microsoft’s cloud-first vision make its BaaS even more meaningful. The BaaS platform has the potential to become a significant revenue generator with fast-emerging decentralized ecosystems in times ahead.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
