Even though analysts need to label and sort enterprise technologies into neat silos, this practice has always been of limited value. As it often makes navigating a buyer toward the right product for their needs much harder than it should be.
2020 has been a year of misery, economic crisis, hardship, political upheaval, and of course, COVID 19. So we want to close this year out with a positive, socially distant, and safe celebration of our industry. To that end, we will soon be launching our Innovation Index Report; in this report, we highlight the technology vendors that have stood out and moved the needle for us.
Business value is one of our most asked about enterprise blockchain topics. It is relatively easy for firms to investigate blockchain from a technology perspective. Indeed, the past few years have seen many minimal viable products/technology proofs of concept. But MVPs are only now beginning to transition to significantly sized production systems. And there are not many of them. What is the problem? True, there are some technical constraints. However, my opinion is that this lack of transition is often due to difficulty understanding blockchain business value from strategic value and business case perspectives.
This past week Peter Brooks and I finished up some client research on the topic of Enterprise Blockchain. The fact is from a year or two of POC’s and poking around; real-world implementations are now underway. What’s interesting to us is that there are two ends to the spectrum of Enterprise Blockchain. At the one end, significant ambitious projects, like transforming entire global supply chains, and the other end, the transformation of under-appreciated but critical tasks. Oddly though, on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be much in between.
The price has not been disclosed, but off the record, estimates tell me that TH Lee has made a tidy profit on their investment and that Hyland has not overpaid. However, as always, it is essential to note that no M&A transaction is without tears. Alfresco ran a long and steady race as an independent championing open source ECM
Although as analysts we try our best to be ‘opinionated’ pragmatists so one thing we know for sure is that the numbers don’t lie. So we can state with certainty that Enterprise Blockchain is a growing market and is set to continue to grow substantially…. Even though it will face plenty of challenges along the way.
The Audit firm Deloitte has been fined 15m pounds for its role in Autonomy’s sale to HP. The fine follows the conviction of Autonomy CFO Sushavan Hussain of fraud and the recent trial of ex Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch in London’s high court, followed by his arrest and extradition request to the US. What a mess.
It turns out that building a global blockchain infrastructure, though not cheap or straightforward, is very do’ able. What was impossible to access just five years ago is now accessible from any connected laptop with the swipe of a credit card. Though admittedly, there is more to be done, the global blockchain backbone exists today and is available to anyone that wants to use or develop upon it.
This year we spent time researching and talking to experts in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the US. The result is this new report Oil & Gas: Mitigate Future Disruptions with an Intelligent Supply Chain. The report is free to access, and we hope you take the time to read it and provide us any feedback you may have.
Oracle, SAP & IBM all have impressive Blockchain credentials; within those organizations, there are people with vision and ambition. But we need that excitement to be reflected if not driven at a higher level within society. Change is on the horizon like it or not; the question is whether we will lead the change or if we are going to get dragged along unwillingly.
