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Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Top 5 ERP News and articles: Week 2019-25: ERP and Block Chain - 1

Checkout my book 'Selected Articles on ERP' on Amazon.com 

The Short URL for this post is http://bit.ly/ERP_BlockChain1

I am starting off this week's series with a provocative question. Do you think Enterprise Blockchain sustain? Abra CEO seem to think that it will fail miserably

This is a two part series on Blockchain. The nine articles that I read so far are awesome and I have to review all of them. Hence, I will be reviewing five articles relating to Blockchain in this week and another five articles in the next week.

The first two articles in this week's selection provides an introduction to Blockchain. This is still a new technology and many people do not know about the technology and its implications for Enterprise.

Since the focus of this blog is on Enterprise Transformation, I felt that it is my bounden duty to start this post by selecting articles explaining Blockchain. Blockchain is still an 'Unknown Territory' for many Business Decision Makers. There are many articles explaining Blockchain. In the blog post of mine that I posted on February 2, 2019, I had reviewed the 'mother of them all' titled How I taught blockchain to my grandmother, written by Enrico Camerinelli. This article still remain my favorite. However, the two articles reviewed here, especially the second one, written by Ameer Rosic for Blockgeeks.com, does awesome job of explaining Blockchain to a layman.



The third article mentions key drivers for Blockchain adoption. One driver is the obvious benefits that business receive due to the transparency and immutability of Blockchain. While Blockchain helps meet the stringent regulatory requirements in some industries like Pharma and Food Processing, in case of certain industries like Financial Services, the regulators themselves may be forcing a transition to Blockchain.

The fourth article is a press release from Oracle on the enhancements to its Blockchain Platform. While the article is technical, I understood that many companies are looking at adopting Blockchain. The fifth article from ERPINNEWS Blog claims that 2019 has been the tipping point of Enterprise Blockchain Adoption. The article cites two reasons for this, one is that many vendors have released Ready-to-use solution on Blockchain. In addition, new technology has facilitated interoperability between applications and technologies.

Read on....Don't forget to let me know what you think.

Top Five Articles


https://blogs.oracle.com/modernfinance/what-is-blockchain-a-primer-for-finance-professionals

As the title says, this is an introductory article explaining Blockchain. Blockchain is applicable where exchange transactions are involved and where both parties keep separate ledger to document their side of the exchange transaction. By maintaining one ledger where both sides of transactions are documented, and in which every entry is verified before it enters the ledger, Blockchain keeps a transparent trail of every transactions between entities.

The benefits of Blockchain are:
  • Increased transactional trust
  • Reduced fraud
  • Reduced risks
  • Lowering of transaction costs
Blockchain creates potential to deliver efficiency, transparency and trust, with less risk, cost and complexity.

Nice article


https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-blockchain-technology/

Blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. By design, a blockchain is resistant to modification of the data.Each new record is called a block and it characterized by Cryptographic hash, a time stamp and the transaction data. The cryptographic hash attached to the block gives it immutability and provides continuity to the chain. 

Blockchain network has no central authority and the information in the chain is open to everyone. Blockchain is applicable in exchange transactions between two entities. One entity initiates the transaction by creating a block. This block is visible to and is verified all the computers in the ecosystem. The verified block is added to a chain that creates a unique record with a unique history. Editing a single block means editing millions of chains spread across the world. 

One advantage of Blockchain is that it lowers transaction costs by eliminating middlemen. The article presents some awesome potential applications of Blockchain in sectors from Travel to Banking. Blockchain will not spare even new technology companies like Uber and Airbnb as per this article.

To simplify the understanding of Blockchain, author compares it to an Excel sheet distributed over the internet. Any change made on the sheet in any one computer will be immediately verified by 'verifiers' and the verified record will be updated in all the copies of  the excel sheet in all computers. This is Blockchain in a nutshell.

The three properties of Blockchain are: 
  • Decentralization
  • Transparency: The transparency does not mean that the private identity of the persons who are transacting is available to everyone. While the personal details remain encrypted, the record of transactions between entities is visible to everyone. However by knowing the private identity of a public address, one can find all the transactions made by that entity. This forces every member to be transparent in a Blockchain.
  • Immutability: This is done through cryptographic hashing. Hashing is the process of converting input strings of variable length to output strings of fixed length. Bitcoin uses a hash algorithm named SHA-256 (Secure Hashing Algorithm 256). Since even a small change in input string causes huge change in the corresponding hash (called avalanche effect), hashing is a very powerful tool in ensuring immutability of Blockchain. 
The article ends by giving 15 Business Use Cases of Blockchain including Land Records, Crowdfunding, Smart Contracts, IoT and Microgrids...

Great article. Thank you Ameer Rosic..


https://it.toolbox.com/blogs/erpdesk/is-erp-technology-ready-for-the-blockchain-revolution-101618

The security, trust, immutability and transparency provided by Blockchain are very attractive for many businesses since they help streamline business processes and make it visible real time. IBM is working with Oracle to provide Blockchain solutions on Oracle Cloud. SAP believes that Blockchain is perfect for Manufacturing since it provides the complete history of every transactions thus helping traceability and early error detection and prevention. 

There are two more drivers for business adoption of Blockchain. One is that it helps meet regulatory requirements in industries like Pharma with high regulatory oversight. In addition, regulators are forcing some industries to adopt Blockchain, for example in case of Financial Services. 

The article is hazy in how ERP and Blockchain are linked.


https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-accelerates-adoption-enterprise-blockchain-021219.html

Oracle is expanding features on its enterprise-grade Oracle Blockchain Platform as per the company's press release. These features will help users speed up the development, integration, and deployment of new blockchain applications. While blockchain can greatly streamline many existing processes businesses have struggled to implement blockchain networks within their existing ecosystems. Oracle Blockchain Platform addresses this challenge by streamlining the process of building and integrating blockchain applications across diverse business networks and connecting them into the relevant business processes within these ecosystems.

The new features include:
  • Enhanced world state database to support standard SQL-based ledger
  • Rich history database which transparently enables analytics integration for interactive dashboards and reports.
  • Enhanced REST APIs for event subscription, blockchain administration/configuration, and monitoring of network health, transaction rates, and other statistics, which simplify integration with existing enterprise IT tools.
  • Identity federation further extends authentication capabilities to work with external identity providers to facilitate consortium blockchains with many diverse participants using their existing identity management systems.
  • Third-party certificate support for registering client organizations on the blockchain network to enable them to use existing certificates issued by trusted third parties.
  • Hyperledger Fabric 1.3 support
Way to go Oracle....


https://erpinnews.com/why-2019-may-become-the-year-of-enterprise-blockchain

As we enter 2019, companies are no longer questioning the need for Blockchain. Instead they are looking at ways to adopt Blockchain solutions. The trend to Blockchain adoption is quickened due to the following factors.
  • Ready-to-use software is available from top vendors: Companies like Amazon, IBM and Oracle offer Enterprise Blockchain Solutions. These come with better scaling mechanisms, security, privacy and additional protocol changes that make them more attractive to the private sector. Enterprise-grade DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology aka Blockchain) enables cross-company collaboration opportunities. Several of the largest world food suppliers are working to create a global food tracing system on blockchain.
  • Interoperability has significantly improved: Lack of connectivity mechanisms between different types of blockchain solutions was a major roadblock to wider adoption. But these days, tech companies are presenting new viable ways for establishing connections between different ledgers.Ripple has released an Interledger – mid-ware arbitrary protocol that can “connect” different types of ledgers, both distributed and traditional centralized ones.
A nice article. Provides a good summary. Do you think these examples are sufficient to say that we have seen the 'Blockchain Inflection Point' in 2019?

Additional Reading

6.https://erp-consultancy.blogspot.com/2019/02/top-5-erp-news-and-articles-week-2019-6.html

https://ultraconsultants.com/erp-software-blog/blockchain-and-erp/

http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2019/02/25/blockchain-fail-abra-ceo

9. Can Blockchain replace EDI in Supply Chain? Stan Gibson for Digitalistmag.com
https://www.digitalistmag.com/digital-supply-networks/2019/03/04/can-blockchain-replace-edi-in-supply-chain-06196784

10. The potential of Blockchain for improving your business model: Nitin Singh and Pravin Lewis for Digitalist mag.
https://www.digitalistmag.com/digital-economy/2019/05/29/potential-of-blockchain-for-improving-your-business-model-06198726

The Year at a Glance

The articles that we have so far covered in this series in Year 2019 are:

22. Week 2019-25: ERP and Block Chain
23. Week 2019-26: ERP On Cloud
24. Week 2019-27: ERP for SMBs

Disclaimer:

The articles in this blog post are those that I found interesting and relevant to the topic of ERP and technology in general. I have no commercial association with any of the entities mentioned in this article. I may be following a few of these entities on LinkedIn and even some of these entities may be on my LinkedIn or Social Media network. These articles are selected purely based on their relevance to the objective of this blog, to promote ERP. Finally, the summary is mine. While I stay close to the points in the articles, I also elaborate a few of them based on my understanding.

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