What is Blockchain all about?

First, Let’s understand…

Blockchain has long been resonating beyond the walls of the software industry. Every day, messages circulate about the development of the Bitcoin price index, while startups are competing to create the next earth-shattering business model based on this technology.

Yet what do we really understand about it?

At the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, an individual or a group of individuals acting under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto sent a paper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” to a mailing list. It contained a practical solution to a problem that had left virtual currency theorists scratching their heads: the Byzantine General’s Problem.

WASL and Blockchain

So what exactly does the system do? It allows us to register and renew smart real estate leases using blockchain technology, which connects all of the partners to the initiative.

Customers can complete the entire process electronically and without having to visit any of the individual offices in person.

In a nutshell, this means that customers can complete the entire process electronically and without having to visit any of the individual offices in person. The process can also be completed within minutes at any time and from anywhere in the world.

Tenants can access the system through a personal identification card to complete several processes such as contract renewals and smart payments through Emirates NBD. Customers are also given a specific DEWA number so they can renew their electricity and water meters within one integrated system and without the need for any documents. The system is 100% electronic and paperless.

The main aim of adopting this state-of-the-art technology is to provide faster and more secure customer services than ever before. It will save them a lot of time and effort, which will enhance their happiness and productivity.

The foreseen future

It will save them a lot of time and effort, which will enhance their happiness and productivity.

This is in line with our leadership’s drive to make Dubai the smartest and happiest city in the world. It is also a direct response to the ‘Dubai Blockchain Strategy’ launched by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Dubai Foundation for the Future, which aims to make Dubai the first government in the world to apply all transactions through this network by 2020.

This initiative is part of our ongoing efforts to make all of our customer services entirely electronic. We are fast approaching our target of offering 100% electronic services and enabling our customers to make more transactions through e-gates on their mobile phones, without the need to visit any of our offices.

This initiative is part of our ongoing efforts to make all of our customer services entirely electronic.

While other countries are still testing this technology, we are proud to be leading the world by adopting it in the real estate sector for the benefit of our customers and Dubai. We are prepared to enter a new era of customer service and hope everyone will join us.

SAP and Blockchain

his blockchain team is charged with driving blockchain tech within SAP. That plays out in three areas:

• Blockchain evangelism – evaluating blockchain tech, fleshing out potential use cases, and “Helping our customers and partners, as well as internal developers, to understand the technology and to understand what you can do with it.“
• End-to-end use case development both internally, and with partners and customers. Typically, this starts with a proof of concept (POC). That means supporting Gil Perez’s team, which is focused on blockchain for IoT and digital supply chain (Howlett assessed our talk with Perez and Rueckert). Zube’s team also supports S/4HANA’s blockchain needs, as well as industry solutions. They report to SAP’s Juergen Mueller, SAP’s Chief Innovation Officer.
• Technology enablement via blockchain as a service – “What we are building right now is a blockchain as a service. This is built on the SAP Cloud Platform.” The official name is vintage SAP bulky nomenclature: SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Services.

Why blockchain as an SAP Service?

So why the focus on delivering blockchain services via SCP? Zube explained:

We want to shield away the complexity of blockchain technology. We also want to offer a platform of protocol-agnostic approach that enables an application developer, whether these are internal developers or external developers, to easily consume blockchain capabilities by just calling rest APIs – rather than really going into the details of each ledger.

SAP’s approach combines standards participation with agnostic views towards emerging protocols. SAP has already been active in Hyperledger (see my recent piece with Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf). Zube:

What we are focusing on right now is Hyperledger Fabric as one of the enterprise-grade protocols. We are in parallel also implementing MultiChain, a lightweight blockchain protocol that has no smart contracts.

We’re also of course looking into Ethereum, or into Quorum or whatever comes up there. [Editor’s note: Quorom is an enterprise version of Ethereum, forked from Ethereum with the financial services industry in mind].

Enterprise adoption – where are we now?

I asked Zube for his take on blockchain adoption – or lack thereof – with live projects (Hyperledger’s Behlendorf estimated 100+ blockchains in production now, though that number includes private/internal projects). Every ledger, a diamond ledger that SAP is looking into participating via the Ariba Network, is one intriguing project that should go live by early next year. Zube started by giving his definition of a live blockchain project:

A POC that runs for a certain part of the whole business, and with live data is not my definition of live. It’s still a POC, proofing and testing. Live means that the whole subject that needs to be done is running, and you have a business value with that one.

POCs with live data is the norm right now, but that could change as soon as next year:

Most cases we see as of now are at that stage where we put the POCs with real data and testing them. This is what we see. We also are already in implementations with current customers where we also hope to be live soon, early next year.