SAP Boosts Blockchain Integration and Customer Flexibility

It was great speaking with Torsten Zube, Head of Blockchain at SAP, about their new services that help customers integrate blockchain and the two new consortia that accelerate industry-specific blockchain co-innovation with customers and partners.

Network Extensibility for Open Business Collaboration        

The new network extensibility services enable customers and partners to integrate different blockchain infrastructures seamlessly. By providing equal functionalities irrespective of their environment, it supports the interplay between:

• SAP-provisioned nodes and those residing on-premise or in a different cloud
• Blockchain-enabled SAP applications and business processes with externally operated nodes and networks

This helps customers meet specific regional, hardware, performance, and regulatory requirements.

New Support for Quorum

To offer customers maximum flexibility, SAP is adding support for Quorum, an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum. This follows SAP’s technology-agnostic approach and complements the existing support of Hyperledger Fabric and MultiChain on the SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain service. Quorum support will be available for early adopters. It allows the use of Ethereum-based smart contracts in permissioned blockchain networks.

Industry Groups Apply Blockchain for Safety, Transparency, and Efficiency

Based on its comprehensive work with customers, SAP has formed two new industry consortium groups within the SAP Blockchain Consortium program: one for the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industries, and the other for agribusiness, consumer products, and retail. The consortia bring SAP customers, partners, and other relevant players together to identify industry-spanning blockchain use cases, areas for cross-industry collaboration, and further benefits of permissioned industry blockchain networks. The two new groups are in addition to the high-tech industry consortium, which has more than doubled in size since its founding earlier this year. SAP has 35 participants in its three industry consortium groups, including AmerisourceBergen, Arvato, CONA – Coke One North America, GlaxoSmithKline plc, and Maple Leaf Foods Inc.

According to Zube, "blockchain enables sharing of information in a democratized way. No central organization owns, operates, or controls the information. Blockchain is a powerful way to create greater trust, transparency, and simplified collaboration among businesses. SAP empowers customers to harness the value of blockchain by offering easy integration, technological flexibility, and industry-specific co-innovation.”

SAP’s expanding work with blockchain comes as companies in more industries seek the advantages of the distributed ledger technology in enterprise applications. A new survey of SAP customers and partners finds greater adoption and increasing interest in functions including corporate finance. For more information, see State of Blockchain Study: Interest and Adoption Rise as Middlemen Move Out.