At the battle for Blockchain Crown rolling out amidst global technical entreprises, ABI Research sorted things out, naming Microsoft as the best world’s blockchain-as-a-service platform.
The advert of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is closely entwined with the robust blockchain technology and that is not a coincidence.
Nowadays only a blind man would reject the widely applicable nature of blockchain technology that has already begun to change every facet of our daily routine.
The fact that ordinary people who have nothing to do with high-level technologies are pretty much aware of disruptive power behind the blockchains vividly signals the involvement of industry professionals.
Microsoft vs IBM
The world’s leading technical giants such as Microsoft and IBM have been examining the blockchain technology almost from the first days of its emergence, and the more blockchain is proving its potential, the more they are getting into it.
Both Big Blue and Microsoft are in possesion of entire departments devoted to the development of blockchain-based solutions. Besides, the two companies have confirmed their fair commitment to the technology by the means of numerous partnerships signed in a bid to foster the blockchain adoption.
For example, Coinspeaker reported that Microsoft has recently teamed up with the ranked auditing firm Ernst and Young seeking to streamline the time-consuming and costly processes of content rights and royalties’ management with the help of the blockchain technology.
On the other hand, IBM struggles to keep up with the Microsoft’s lead, as the other day the multinational technology company partnered Columbia University for the project aimed at scaling the next generation of blockchain innovation.
Best Provider of Blockchain Services
Considering that the cutting-edge technology behind the distributed ledger is gradually gaining plenty of public attention, it is clear why the two prominent companies clashed in a fight for the industry dominance.
However, a market-foresight advisory firm ABI Research has put an end to this tough competition, as it finally defined a winner, Microsoft namely.
According to ABI Research, Microsoft is officially deemed to be the best blockchain-as-a-service platform provider mostly because of its integration with Azure cloud computing platform.
While Microsoft leads overall, it is followed very closely by IBM, which is marginally ahead in terms of innovation. Both companies are considered as industry veterans with more than 10 years of deep hands-on experience in the blockchain development.
Additionally the Blockchain-as-a-Service competitive assessment ranked 11 vendors currently competing in the BaaS space including Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Cisco, HPE, Huawei, Oracle, SAP, and Tencent.
As a part of criteria framework, ABI Research analyzed market penetration, proof of concepts and pilots, and ecosystem support, and implementation metrics such as platform diversity, primary features, developer resources, and integration with their own solutions.
The headline-grabbing results show that Microsoft and IBM were head shoulders above the competition in the blockchain-as-a-service sector, while the rest of the assessed vendors are grouped loosely into a peloton, headed by SAP, and followed closely by Oracle and Cisco.
Speaking on the recent findings, Research Director at ABI Research, Michela Menting said:
“The advent of cloud offerings in the space shows that blockchain technology is ripe for productization. Microsoft and IBM are capitalizing on the numerous proof of concepts and pilots that have been tested on their platforms in the last 2 years, the first of which are already being commercialized.”
While IBM has some of the more advanced pilots to date, Microsoft leads on the implementation front, with a broad range of platform choices and deep integration with its existing cloud services.
As for the more recent entrants into the market, alike Oracle and Cisco, they have accelerated the commercialization of their offerings, providing feature-rich platforms and and integration with both their own and third-party solutions.
Some of them are of particular interest offering interesting BaaS platforms at varying stages of maturity and deployment. As such, their relative youth and the nascent nature of the BaaS market means that this current standing is likely to change very rapidly over the coming year.
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