Mass Adoption of Blockchain will be Enterprise Lead
By: Gilbert Verdian
Tags: Transformation, Enterprise, Integration, Blockchain, Decentralization

How Overledger removes barriers and simplifies the adoption of blockchain technologies for Enterprise.

Enterprises and Governments are the driving forces to technological adoption. Companies and organisations deliver digital and non-digital services to customers and citizens. The business need is to create value and deliver a service or product to their customers while maintaining an acceptable level of service.

Technology as an enabler for business allows for innovation and the creation of new solutions to deliver value. With innovation comes challenges faced by enterprise to install, integrate and implement technology. Demands on IT can be categorised as:

Demands on IT

Each enterprise environment is unique and different, made up with legacy technology and decisions which have been built upon a foundation of systems that are integrated to serve a purpose. Adding new technologies to an enterprise stack is complex. Each and every project must comply and align with the Enterprise Architecture. A common framework which allows for a way to integrate within a structured architecture.

For Enterprise to adopt a new technology like blockchain, the integrity of existing systems must be maintained without jeopardising systems and sustaining SLAs, service level agreements.



New technologies need to integrate easily without signification changes and disruption to the existing backend. Many early blockchain projects attempted to change the existing core of a banking system expecting a seamless integration. Where they failed was not realising the complex nature of enterprise systems and the intricacies of the backend integration.

Implementing blockchain technologies with the current approach requires the whole core backend system to be transformed.

This is something that many enterprises are not willing to risk due to the complex nature and cost of enterprise transformation.

The approach we have taken with Overledger, is to simplify the integration of any blockchain while maintaining the integrity of existing architectures.

The current challenges for enterprise using blockchain and DLT today are:

The barrier to get started is very high

• High cost — 8 months lead time and £3m sunk cost

• Technical and Interoperability limitations

• Vendor and technology lock-in

• Complex infrastructure

• Lack of technical resources and skills

• Security challenges with P2P networks

A typical enterprise takes a long time to stand up and run a project. To manage risk and compliance, budgets need approving, projects need to get the green light from investment and governance committees, the project needs to be in line with the organization’s enterprise architecture and support the strategy and vision. Plus, there’s procurement and sourcing who are part of finance and need all the vendor documentation and contracts in place to manage risk before approving the project. Even executives at the C-level (CEO, CIO, CTO, CISO) in organizations who own the budget, are accountable and make strategy decisions can’t bypass the controls and processes in place, everyone has to follow the approach.

Organisations operate by managing risk (first-line to third-line controls) to ensure compliance with contractual requirements and regulation.

From our background and experience, a typical enterprise takes about 8 months of average to start a project and it will cost about £3m in sunk cost before they see the potential return on investment.

Enterprise project lifecycle

OVERLEDGER

Overledger is the world’s first blockchain operating system (OS) that not only inter-connects blockchains but also existing networks to blockchain and facilitates the creation of internet scale multi-chain applications otherwise known as mApps. Start building game changing applications with no additional infrastructure, using existing resources, and have the choice of interoperability in as little as 8 minutes.

We’ve removed the barriers to adoption for enterprise, keeping existing systems and integrating simply with just 3 lines of code. An entire enterprise stack can be blockchain enabled by using Overledger.

We’ve abstracted a complex enterprise architecture into 3 lines of code.