Fresh fruits from India are sent by sea towards Dubai, where they are processed into juices and transported by air to Spain. A year back, Dubai started to become an international blockchain hub to handle the trade transactions with the technology. What IBM’s Watson IoT is doing is quite easy to think as small scale F/OSS project on a table – they are using sensors to capture data, and using Blockchain software in conjunction with other softwares at backend for transaction and other processes to optimise a particular business. Most of these softwares and projects are essentially F/OSS – Libre Hardware and Libre Software. IBM Cloud is delivering a managed, optimised service but there is almost no vendor lock-in. Almost no as one may argue that IBM Watson is not exactly F/OSS. Watson uses IBM’s DeepQA software with Apache UIMA framework and Apache Hadoop framework. Even with source code, one will need to buy IBM’s Z Series mainframe computer. That DeepQA software is directly related to famous IBM Deep Blue, which is a reference point for judging the capability of the computer relative to human being. For this article on IBM Cloud And The Rise Of F/OSS Blockchain In Indian Businesses, we have divided the subtopics in easy to understand small paragraphs. We want to discuss few parts which are relatively unknown to many – one is Blockchain, second thing is usage of F/OSS hardware or software which we commonly talk around, third part is name of some Indian businesses who are adapting the model, forth is current situation and opportunities for the developers. We guess the Blockchain part mostly new to many. In this article, we are will discuss about them in brief.
| Table of Contents |
What Is Blockchain In Short?
2 years back we said that IBM not going to forget mainframe and in the same year OpenStack on IBM mainframe. IBM almost single company who are still maintaining mainframe computer production and integrating their own hosted distributed and mainframe based software solutions which are towards machine learning based. Possibly you heard about IBM’s new way of transaction which is faster than conventional. It is more easy to say “cloud” than going towards technical backend fabric computing, distributed computing, mainframe computing, container based virtualization including docker.
---
Blockchain technology secure the direct transactions over the worldwide web. Range can be from contracts to ensuring suppliers and consumers to connect directly to each other in the network without the need for a third-party. The technology is based on a decentralized database model distributed in a peer-to-peer network. This system can not be controlled intruded by any attacker or hacked, because simply the network is permissioned.
IBM Blockchain as a Service is based on Hyperledger. Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort to develop blockchain technologies, which is hosted and started by The Linux Foundation in December 2015. IBM provides Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer solution. Members of the initiative are Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Red Hat, VMware, ANZ Bank etc to name a few. There are Hyperledger blockchain clients and Hyperledger developer tools. Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Sawtooth Lake are Hyperledger blockchain clients. Hyperledger Cello, Hyperledger Composer, Hyperledger Explorer, Hyperledger Indy are tools. Golang and Java are commonly used programming language. Obviously, there is Docker image is available on GitHub to set up and run a blockchain network. So, at the end, a developer actually can test on own machine – local computer or virtualized server capable to run Docker.
What IBM Cloud Has To Offer As Cloud Services?
IBM included their new and old known products including all possible cloud products, IoT, Watson based AI under the Bluemix brand. Whereas Blockchain is kept as separate but is connected with Bluemix. Bluemix PaaS is well known and we previously talked about usage of PaaS for development.
What IBM doing is correct and we pointed long before on this website – they are giving importance to on-premise, hybrid cloud and keeping the public cloud part slightly separate adjusted to the type of businesses. Definitely IoT, Big Data solutions, IBM Watson driven AI, serverless computing are relatively newer. But it is pretty marketing only promotion to think only about the basic need of businesses such as servers, storage, emails. They really not a big matter of headache at present irrespective of the platform used – cloud, dedicated, colocation, own datacenter. All of them has good F/OSS based automation. In many situations, deploying a Big Data analysis platform or running own blockchain on own datacenter for simple work becomes almost impractical from the point of cost effectiveness. They are really good for development to usage within a small work. Businesses should make their own target to happen.
Furthermore, IBM planned to include OpenStack among their arsenal. IBM already has a good presence in the European Cloud business, the penetration was easier as there were developers who are capable to ensure a high degree of agility which will allow the businesses to adapt quickly and react quickly and dynamically to new the requirements. Ensuring a high degree of agility is an accepted feature which software development cycle is thought to deliver. Needless to state that there are upcoming technologies which are already available like serverless computing, which may be beneficial for a particular business. Of course IBM acquired many other cloud products including basic public cloud service like SoftLawyer to Upstream video streaming. Advantage of F/OSS is that, one who will use OpenStack on IBM can follow and use our guides on HP Cloud’s OpenStack Swift. Indeed it is possible to use our developed easy scripts for OpenStack Swift.
Current Scenario Of Blockchain In Indian Businesses
Many traditional Indian businesses were either not aware of the latest offerings from various F/OSS projects as well as possibly not considered the offerings by the private companies or were thoughtful to take the risks. OpenStack not exactly so much widely adapted than the effort the whole earth spent and spending behind. But in recent time, a good number of old and new Indian companies started to adapt various cloud products offered by IBM. There are pure Indian companies – Aditya Birla’s retail fashion, Bajaj electrical, Mahindra group, Kalyan jewellers who are using IBM’s Watson solution coupled with their other cloud services. We are not going in-depth around the news matters – there are more international companies with stable business in India who are in the list of users of Blockchain. News sources and official analysis would be more appropriate to understand case specific application. How Aditya Birla is making their customers satisfied is really what IBM and Aditya Birla can say better.
Discussion
India has well versed developers, engineers to automate recurring tasks such as testing, build processes, minimising complexity, increasing development speed, and reduction of the error rate. It is needless to state that using ready to use some cloud services add the advantage of avoiding training the new employees, also they are easier to use because there is no need to introduce the manual deployment steps. IBM Blockchain as a Service shown the possibility for the developers to show their capabilities on various needed technologies which includes container virtualisation (read as Docker), coding skill, a grasp on related F/OSS IoT.
What the title of the article is about – Indian businesses are indirectly and correctly being forced to use Libre Hardware, Libre Software which they were being not exactly towards, regardless of the reason why. IBM Blockchain as a Service means knowledge about Hyperledger, which means their CIOs are knowing about The Linux Foundation. Increasing usage of IBM Blockchain in Indian businesses in long term doing the good for their own IT departments just like OpenStack software did or like the virtual instances in Cloud Computing forced the webmaster to learn minimum SSH works instead of using a shared server or shared VPS. Chance is that, some of the companies directly will take part in the development of these F/OSS than merely using them as a passive end user.
