Blockchain and Business Adoption — our event with Zühlke Engineering (June 21st)

We are running a blockchain event together with our partner Zühlke Engineering on June 21st (https://www.zuehlke.com/de/de/ueber-uns/events-messen/blockchain-event-2018/)

The invitation states:

The leading question about Blockchain is the question about its application, use cases. Almost all companies are working on finding the silver bullet. We have an answer.

The subject of that event is to raise awareness about blockchain for enterprises in general and of course demonstrating the Unibright vision.

In this blog post, we give some insights on the current state of business adoption concerning blockchain technology, and why we think events like this are vital to blockchain adoption!

We started to become serious about a dedicated blockchain framework (and a corresponding token launch) in 2017. We have been so deep into the subject since, that we sometimes actively “change roles” with the majority of enterprises, and understand their feeling about blockchain.

Being in the middle of 2018, we can state

• Many companies have heard of blockchain and do not confuse it with crypto currencies anymore. Great start!
• Interested IT specialists within the companies want to go for bringing blockchain technology to their domain, but still have to ask/convince their bosses if it’s ok to do so. A lot of know-how transfer is still in front of us!
• We noticed that we still have to “sell” blockchain as a technology, besides promoting our own solution. Luckily our template based approach makes it easy for us to meet the potential customers at their domain and also motivate them to “try” out new things like moving parts of their processes into a blockchain.

The main problems for enterprises we address with Unibright still hold true

• Developers are rare! Smart contract coding is hard and not comparable to usual development — Unibright generates code automatically!
• Existing systems! Enterprises invested thousands to millions in their existing systems, sometimes planning ROI (return of investment) over 10 or more years. They will not switch off everything they have and move to blockchain for 100% — Unibright integrates existing off-chain systems automatically!
• Different implementations and protocols! Looking at the current gartner hype cycle, blockchain technology is still 5–10 years away from mass adoption and reaching the “plateau of productivity”. It’s very hard for enterprises to decide for a specific protocol or implementation now, without knowing if this decision will last — with Unibright they can work on their processes independently from a specific blockchain!
• Monitoring! With every new technology arising, the system landscapes get more and more complicated — with Unibright, we lower this “information hurdle” by giving an unified business intelligence view over all participating systems of a process, no matter if on- or off-chain!

So, what’s the conclusion?

Most of the times, we talk about “integration” as a pure technical matter, like “integration = connecting enterprises and their IT-systems”. But we have to do integration on different levels and build a complete ecosystem!

• Integrate the community: To gain mass adaption you need the masses! That’s why we not only create a product but also build a community around early adopters and blockchain enthusiasts, show up on conferences and events, do hackathons and public events like the one with Zühlke. We want to empower the Unibright community members to also work as ambassadors for blockchain technology.
• Integrate partners: To really bring a new technology to the masses (= the enterprises) you need partners (technical, go-to-market, strategic, legal, marketing…) and let them participate on the adoption and growth. That’s why events like this one or our Hackathon with Microsoft make so much sense.
• Integrate blockchains and other projects: Blockchain is an emerging market! Unibright is the perfect framework to include existing and new blockchain protocols as well as different ERP systems. It’s not about competition, it’s about opportunities!

Blockchain is still a new technology, probably “somewhere between kindergarten and primary school”. And just like a young human being, it needs to mature. It will only be able to do so by communicating with its environment, by integration on all these levels!

This is our core mission — helping enterprises to make use of blockchain technology. Even if they only try it in 2018, they will understand how to make profit out of it in 2019 and demand will explode by 2020 and later. We are an early player relying on an existing product and more than 15 years of experience in enterprise integration, we are well prepared!

We are very looking forward to the blockchain event together with our partner Zühlke, and we will post a summary of the outcome here!