Multinational tech giants Intel and SAP have teamed up to address gaps in the market for solutions that power enterprise blockchain workloads. Both companies are already business partners for over 25 years and their collaboration has recently expanded to distributed ledger technology (DLT). Together, they intend to create blockchain solutions and integrate them with new and existing business applications so customers can take full advantage of this technology.
SAP recently launched the SAP HANA Blockchain adapter, which makes it quick and easy for developers to create blockchain solutions that harmonize multi-party transactions and allow customers to establish trustful networks and transparent business processes. SAP also offers Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) on the SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain, which allows customers to integrate enterprise and blockchain data in a pay-as-you-go model. Intel, on the other hand, has processor technologies that can help improve the privacy, security, scalability, and trust across blockchain networks.
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SAP and Intel, along with other industry leaders have partnered to create a blockchain-based supply chain management proof-of-concept solution based on SAP Global Track and Trace (also referred to as International Trade based on the SAP Co-Innovation Program). Together with Flex, HPE, and UPS, they are working to enhance freight, fleet, and fulfillment management across networks and for enhanced visibility into global and domestic transportation to optimize logistics, gain new efficiencies and improve service delivery. These advances allow customers real-time insights into the availability of materials and products across the entire supply chain to better control inventory and manage costs.
Both the companies are also performing benchmarking studies to analyze blockchain metrics such as transactions per second to identify network bottlenecks that could be optimized with more powerful, higher performing technologies. Intel said that this benchmark collaboration is significant for existing blockchain deployments since current blockchains can be associated with latency and slow throughput issues.
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Benchmarking various SAP workloads will allow both the companies to assess what software and/or hardware optimizations can assist in increasing blockchain performance and efficiency. Certain workloads may require specific hardware configurations for optimal performance, and Intel and SAP are working on defining these parameters, thereby creating technical standards for individual blockchain use cases.
Earlier in June of this year, Intel partnered with Enigma, a blockchain technology firm focussed on building scalable, end-to-end decentralized applications, for research and development efforts to advance the development of privacy-preserving computation technologies. Both intend to solve the largest challenges facing blockchains: privacy, security, and scalability.