IBM, AWS, Ardor Leading a New Wave of Enterprise Blockchain Adoption – Everest Group Report

After the price of Bitcoin spiked in December 2017, the mantra for 2018 was “blockchain, not Bitcoin.” Industry pundits looked to enterprise adoption as the means of recovering the value in cryptocurrencies. During 2019, as blockchain entered the Gartner hype cycle “trough of disillusionment,” the focus shifted to the original use case – cryptocurrencies. The increasing availability of regulated derivatives via exchanges such as CME and Bakkt started to pique institutional interest.

Now, it seems that the pendulum is due to swing back to enterprise adoption in 2020. Even so soon into the new year, there have been several developments that indicate this could be the case. Tradelens, the blockchain platform developed by IBM and deployed by Maersk to manage its global shipping logistics, has made two significant strides. Firstly, the Port of Oman, the biggest in the Middle East, is now on board, joining over 100 others on the platform that manages more than 10 million shipping events each week. The value of Tradelens is proving so vital to the global shipping sector that US regulators have now given the nod to certain carriers co-operating on the system without the oversight of the Federal Maritime Commission.

The blockchain in telecoms market is also poised for significant growth over the coming years. A recently released market research report predicts that blockchain in telecoms will increase at a rate of over 80 percent CAGR between now and 2026.

Moves by industry players appear to be justifying this prediction. For example, telecoms giant Telefonica recently partnered with the Spanish Association of Science and Technology Parks to give around 8,000 firms access to its Hyperledger blockchain platform. Firms can experiment with the technology and issuing their own tokens.
“Big Tech Battle” for Enterprise Clients

Global consulting and research firm Everest Group is evidently predicting a surge in enterprise adoption. The company has published an in-depth report assessing twelve different blockchain-as-a-service providers in terms of their readiness for an upcoming “adoption wave.”

With a title making reference to the “Big-tech Battle,” it’s perhaps no surprise that big names such as IBM, AWS, and Alibaba Cloud appear among the twelve. However, Everest Group has also included Ardor, the open-source blockchain platform operated by Jelurida, which also operates Nxt and Ignis.

The executive summary of the report groups each participant into one of four categories, including leaders, niche, nascent providers, and visionaries. It puts Jelurida into the latter group. The report also mentions that Ardor is easy to use, which perhaps justifies its inclusion when other more well-known public blockchains such as EOS or Ethereum weren’t mentioned. After all, barriers to entry is one of the biggest challenges facing enterprise blockchain adoption, particularly for smaller companies.

Examining the trends in blockchain, it seems justified that we can expect that a surge on enterprise adoption is on its way. After all, the ICO boom saw a vast amount of hype, which was never going to sustain the industry by itself. Many predicted that 2019 would see a renewed focus on building, with the hashtag #BUIDL signifying the momentum on development.

It’s now to be expected that 2020 would see the results of those efforts, meaning blockchain is now in a better state of enterprise readiness for 2020. Of the many use cases for blockchain touted throughout 2018, it seems inevitable that some of them will now start to bear the fruit that was initially promised