MARKET REPORT Emerging Technologies
“I believe Blockchains and associated DApps (decentralised applications) will disrupt almost every
business sector in the next 3 to 5 Years and the comms space will be no exception”
Chris Money, Director at Cloudstreet Consultancy
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Louisa Gregory, Chief of Sta at
Colt Technology Services
distributed computing platform
and operating system) based
protocols.
Is it worth it? Since
Blockchain is likely to prove
highly pervasive, with the
concept, virtues and lessons
being relatable across use cases.
It is certainly worth getting an
understanding of the capabilities
and the fundamentals. As
one person quoted ‘2018
in Blockchain years is the
equivalent to 1994 to the 1996
internet boom’.”
BLOCKCHAIN CHARACTERISTICS
• Decentralised, serverless network of peers which affords resilience
and removes controlling power from individuals or groups consisting
of less than 51% of participants.
• Transparent and Trustless, open and built on a ‘lack of trust’
assumption, processes, transactions and historical record states are
visible.
• Secure and Immutable, strong encryption protects data, and records
or transactions cannot be undone.
THESE CHARACTERISTICS CAN BE LEVERAGED FOR
• Proof of Authenticity, due to the transparency and sharing of
immutable records which can be leveraged for many things such as
ownership and product traceability.
• Reliability and security, without single points of failure, or being
sensitive to attack, or players with additional power, they are
inherently incorruptible.
• Smart contracts, essentially automated functions, enable business
terms to be executed as part of the transaction or vice versa.
These contracts are highly effi cient and cost effective, enabling
substitution of cumbersome trusted party oversight.
ED SAYS…
Blockchain reminds me of a disingenuous headline I wrote many years ago, ‘E=mc2
– It’s Not Rocket Science’. This might sound a bit Sgt Pepper but 20 years ago I was
hosting a seminar on ISDN for a distributor and after about 30 minutes a few resellers
got up and left without a word. At the end, one of the hosts told me those that had left
said to him that ISDN will never catch on so it was a waste of their time being there.
to blockchain, it’s important to
not simply employ it for the sake
of it. So a core skill set would be
identifying if blockchain is the
right technology for the problem
at hand.”
Right now, is it worth the
effort?
“ e short-term answer is yes,”
continued Gregory, “ ere is
a role for blockchain. It may
be niche now – and it may
remain niche in the future
– but there will be on-going
demand for blockchain experts
and blockchain solutions. By
learning about blockchain now
– even to the extent of making
the e ort to specialise in it –
bodes wells for the future.
However, it should be noted
that no technology should
replace good governance. While
it is likely that blockchain
will shift from being niche
to mainstream, during this
transition, a critical learning
should be what are the
structures within organisations
that need to be put in place
to make the most of this
transformative technology.”
Chris Money reminds us,
“ is is the 4th industrial
revolution and I believe there
is a huge opportunity in our
market to reduce costs by
improved management systems
and simpli ed administration
whilst improving customer
service and combating fraud.
I expect that smart contracts
will be the most signi cant
driver of this, with the move
to Everything as a Service
the opportunity is there
for the picking, these new
e cient contracts could also
be automated to include ‘pay
for what you use’ rather than
xed term. Some individual
Blockchain protocols can also
be combined (stacked) like
Lego bricks to provide more
complex functionality to suit
the speci c sector and business
needs, and we are now seeing
a range of interoperability
projects particularly on the
Ethereum (an open-source,
public, blockchain-based
38 | Comms Business Magazine | July 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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