Kaleido, a ConsenSys venture project, today announced its Blockchain Business Cloud is now available on Microsoft Azure’s Marketplace. This new support for Azure, in tandem with Kaleido’s earlier collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), allows Kaleido to offer a seamless blockchain solution spanning multiple cloud providers and geographic regions.
Decentralized ownership of the network across clouds and regions is a foundational enterprise blockchain requirement and Kaleido’s new borderless blockchain capability uniquely fills this need, enabling an accelerated pace of adoption by global blockchain consortia.
Blockchain technology is sweeping across enterprises in all major industries. With its shared ledger and smart contract software, blockchain requires business network participants to collaborate in order to deploy and operate the technology. This collaboration can often take the form of blockchain consortia: groups of organizations that collaborate to define use cases and to develop and run blockchain applications for shared business utility. In fact, according to a recent study by Deloitte, 74% of respondents said their company was either already participating in a blockchain consortium or likely to join one.
Yet organizations to date have struggled to progress blockchain projects in part because each enterprise brings its own pre-existing investments in cloud, IT structures, operating preferences and data residency requirements. Participants starting with different entry points could find themselves siloed in one cloud when they want to graduate out of limited size pilots into large scale hybrid business networks where they can realize the full value of blockchain ecosystem initiatives.
According to industry analysts, AWS and Azure comprise over 80 percent of the public cloud sector. For the first time, the enterprises they serve around the globe can now collaborate to build diverse business networks on a single, cross-cloud solution operating on the Kaleido platform.
“Blockchain with its shared ledger is fundamentally a distributed technology. The world’s transactional systems are being reinvented on blockchain and need an enterprise platform that also is broadly distributed. We’ve built our platform across the leading public clouds including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to give our clients the ability to create global, cross-cloud networks. Our customers’ digital ecosystems can now grow and scale wherever and however the participants require.”
Kaleido’s Blockchain Business Cloud platform enables enterprises to accelerate from the proof-of-concept stage to production blockchain networks for diverse ecosystems. Since its launch in May 2018, Kaleido has helped enterprises deploy over a thousand consortia blockchain networks, producing over 150 million blocks, with some of the world’s most recognizable brands, like T-Mobile, Kroger, Heineken, Sony, Fox, UnionBank, and many others, participating in live networks.
“Microsoft continues to work deeply with the Ethereum community to advance applications of enterprise blockchain. We’re happy to welcome Kaleido to our rich blockchain partner ecosystem, so enterprises can realize the business value of blockchain faster.”
Kaleido customer komgo is a blockchain-based commodity trade and finance group comprised of global institutions like Citi, ING, Koch Supply & Trading, MUFG Bank, Societe Generale, ABN AMRO Bank, Credit Agricole Group, BNP Paribas, Shell and others, who each have varying needs and preferences when it comes to deployment. If one member wants to run on Azure, and another wants to run on AWS, they can seamlessly work together in a single blockchain network on Kaleido.
“As networks onboard new members and scale, these sorts of capabilities from Kaleido are critical to remove friction and tear down barriers to adoption so organizations can accelerate their path to building live production solutions for diverse business cases.”
The Kaleido Marketplace of plug-and-play services, integrations and partner software such as HD wallets for privacy and ID registries for organizational identity, as well as industry products such as Chainlink for smart contract oracles, Viant for supply chain management, OpenLaw and Clause.io for real-time legal contracts, are all now available on Microsoft Azure.
