As it publishes its Blockchain Codex, 451 Research has revealed that 28% of enterprises are now evaluating or using blockchain although fewer than 3% have any production applications.
According to the 2017 Voice of the Enterprise Cloud Transformation, Vendor Evaluations study (add link), 20% of organizations surveyed are using blockchain in a discovery or evaluation phase, 4% running trials or pilots, 2% in test and development environments, 2% undertaking initial implementations of production applications and less than 1% have broad implementation of production applications.
The market is rife with blockchain-washing and there is little understanding about how enterprises can deploy blockchain profitably while navigating a market with thousands of vendors and hundreds of consortia vying for mindshare. The Blockchain Codex systematically decodes this market with the goal of replacing confusion and complexity with an examination of the technology components and guidance on first steps.
Analysts believe blockchain has the potential to be the active ingredient for establishing universal trust amongst parties through clever code and peer consensus. In the enterprise sector, where smart contracts will dictate terms and cloud-tasking using multiple providers is the norm, there will be a need for transparency and an immutable system of record. At the edge, IoT devices could take advantage of blockchain for authentication and to store and share interactions and data.
“Ultimately blockchain will do for transactions what the Internet has done for information. It promises to disrupt business models and entire industries. It allows for increased trust and efficiency, and is pushing us to challenge how we define and exchange value and reward participation,” said Csilla Zsigri, the report’s author and senior analyst, cloud transformation and blockchain at 451 Research.
With a scarcity of skills in blockchain technology and potential applications, there is a tremendous opportunity for third party expertise that can help define and support proof of concepts and initial deployments.
