Oracle has officially released its Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service, a development platform built on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric. The subscription-based service aims to help businesses track goods transparently and securely through supply chains on a global scale.
Oracle said the new offering provides customers with a highly available platform to build their own blockchain networks, and to quickly integrate with Oracle SaaS and third-party applications they already use, as well as other blockchain networks and Oracle PaaS products.
It also enables users to provision blockchain networks, join other organizations, and deploy and run smart contracts to update and query the ledger. (Blockchain creates a tamper-proof, distributed account of transactions on a network for all participants).
What is Hyperledger Fabric?
Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation.
It was initially contributed by New York-based fintech Digital Asset and IBM via a hackathon. It is intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture. The project has grown to more than 145 members since its inception, spanning various industries including finance, healthcare, the Internet of Things, credit card services, supply chain and aeronautics, among several others.
The open source platform allows users to “plug-and-play” a variety of blockchain consensus and membership services, so is highly adaptable. It uses container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the application logic of the system.
Now generally available, a beta of Oracle’s cloud offering has been used in recent months by Arab Jordan Investment Bank, CargoSmart, Indian Oil, Nigeria Customs, Sofbang, and TradeFin among others.
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In a release, Oracle said the platform is pre-assembled with all the underlying infrastructure dependencies, container lifecycle management, event services, identity management, REST proxy, and a number of operations and monitoring tools integrated under a single console.
“Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service is an Oracle-managed cloud platform backed by a 99.95 percent availability SLA, with built-in high availability configuration, autonomous recovery agents, as well as continuous ledger backup capabilities that can enable multi-datacenter disaster recovery across availability domains.”
Who’s Using It?
“Blockchain projects are quickly moving from pilot to production as enterprises and governments begin to see the inherent value of distributed ledgers and smart contracts,” said Robert Parker, group vice president of manufacturing and retail insights, IDC. “As spending accelerates, buyers will need an enterprise class platform beyond open source that includes data security and integrity, scalability, manageability, and interoperability.”
Steve Siu the CEO of CargoSmart, added in a release: “We are using Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service to develop an application to help simplify the complex documentation processes that plague the shipping industry. It… has allowed us to quickly turn prototypes into viable products in several 12-week sprints and so far, we have seen proven productivity gains of more than 30 percent compared to other blockchain platforms we tested. Another key purchasing requirement were its integrated management and operations tools, which allow business partners to monitor all of their blockchain activities and the health of the network.”
Andrea Biagianti, CIO of Certified Origins aded: “As the producer of Extra Virgin Olive Oil from fruits grown in small family farms in Italy, we wanted to trace our product that we sell in the US market branded Bellucci Evoo across the entire supply chain – ‘from the tree to the shelf’. The availability of Oracle’s blockchain service simplifies the implementation and collaboration of all parties included, and represents a real competitive advantage for us. It adds a further level of transparency and information that is valuable for consumers looking for quality products and helps us to support the excellence of the small farms.”
