Oracle climbs on blockchain bandwagon with new cloud service

Oracle is working hard to be a SaaS vendor that matters, whether with its new autonomous database service or getting involved with blockchain. Today, the database giant announced a new blockchain service at Oracle OpenWorld that aims to give enterprise customers who want to get involved with the blockchain, a fully managed approach.

“There are not a lot of production-ready capabilities around Blockchain for the enterprise. There [hasn’t been] a fully end-to-end, distributed and secure blockchain as a service,” Amit Zavery, senior vice president at Oracle Cloud said.

The Oracle blockchain service is built on the open source Hyperledger Fabric project The company joined the Hyperledger project in August ahead of this announcement. Oracle joins IBM in building a blockchain cloud service on top of the Hyperledge Fabric project.

Zavery says the purpose of this service is to give those companies who are interested in the technology a running start by taking the base capabilities in the open source project, then adding security, confidential permissions and APIs to build blockchain applications on top of that. He says there is also transaction monitoring and processing under the covers.

Blockchain is the technology originally created to track bitcoin digital currency on the internet. The idea of a secure, distributed ledger has caught on with many business cases in verticals like real estate, insurance, government and healthcare.

“Blockchain is one of the hardest technologies that Silicon Valley-based companies have ignored. Most innovation had been happening in the rest of world,” Ray Wang founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research told TechCrunch.

He added, “Larry [Ellison] is heavily focused on cybersecurity at all levels and Oracle’s [blockchain] service focuses in on how to deliver secure transactions.”

Oracle is attempting to offer a wide variety of cloud services to compete more fully with AWS, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and others who have a big head start in the cloud over Oracle. Over the last couple of years, the company has accelerated its cloud strategy and increase the number and type of services to its customers. This year’s OpenWorld is about building on all of that.

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