July, 202019 Blockchain has been on a roll since the beginning of 2018 with news about innovative ways of its use. Besides that, there is a lot of educative content published, that has helped demystify blockchain concepts. There was also enough to read that helped in resolving the confusion between Bitcoin and Blockchain. Bitcoin as you know, is a specific application of blockchain technology which in turn is a type of a distributed ledger. There have been several PoCs that have had a successful run and even more ideas on how it can be applied to many more use cases in a variety of industries. The development on the technology seems to be taking place in two distinct plains, one is the startup space which has been active vibrantly since long and caters to application and infrastructure alike, the other is the enterprise applications space, where lot of the development is in the PoC stage and is expected to be so for some more time, before production ready applications can become a reality. Blockchain ­ enterprise use casesFor the purpose of this article, let's focus on the enterprise landscape. In an enterprise, a blockchain solution can be classified into two broad categories, one which could help reduce cost and the second which could improve revenue either by increasing existing revenue or by introducing a new revenue stream. Cost reduction is possible when certain attributes of blockchain are leveraged to improve efficiency, transparency, and traceability in the current process. Positively impacting revenue however, would require a more disruptive approach, solutions resulting out of such disruptions would introduce new models of business and revenue. So, it is mainly about cost reduction v/s revenue generation. What should the enterprise choose? There is no simple answer to this question, but going by the current trends in the industry, it appears that the former will come earlier and more frequently compared to the latter, which may take longer. Looking at the current examples of PoCs being executed it can be observed that the enterprises are focusing on cost reduction, examples being insurance claims processing, international trade finance, funds transfer and supply chain among others. All of these are existing business processes to which blockchain is being applied with efficiency improvement as the primary goal, leading to cost optimization.The supply chain scenario Outside of the financial service space, supply chain is a very popular use case and has seen a maximum number of trials recently. One of the flavors of the supply chain scenario is the very popular Food Safety pilot in China commissioned by the food safety department at Walmart. The primary blockchain feature used here is Provenance, but its application has far reaching impact in tracking contaminated food, saving lives, cost saving related to re-call, and increasing customer loyalty. A single complaint of a consumer falling ill after consuming the fruit, could potentially put a blanket stop on sale of Mangoes across the country, what's worse is it can take today up to 7 days to track the origin of the specific lot of mangoes. In the pilot-run that Walmart conducted, it took just 2.2 seconds as compared to 7 days, to trace the lot of mangoes in question. While this can help isolate the re-call, it will also enable to trace a specific limited set of consumers who are affected or may get affected. BLOCKCHAIN IN THE ENTERPRISEAgnelo MarquesBY AGNELO MARQUES, VP TECHNOLOGY & HEAD BLOCKCHAIN COE, MPHASISCXO NSIGHTS
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