ABI Research has undertaken an assessment on industrial applications of blockchain as a service (BaaS) – and declared IBM at the top of the tree, with Microsoft not far behind.
The two companies were cited as ‘clear leaders’ in the report, which analysed six industrial BaaS vendors on innvation and implementation. IBM came out on top in both categories, ABI Research explained.
“The firm’s platform is open to a broad range of industrial verticals and has run a significant number of pilots and PoCs in the last five years, making it by far the most prominent BaaS provider in the space,” the company noted. “It also offers a broad range of platform choices and provides multi-cloud integration above and beyond the other offerings.”
Microsoft took the silver medal in the analysis, with Oracle in third. Alibaba, Amazon and SAP were the other vendors assessed; ABI Research said their BaaS platforms were ‘robust’, but were more limited in their industrial play compared to the assessment leaders.
The assessment has markedly similar findings to that of Everest Group, who also put IBM and Microsoft at the top of its analysis of managed blockchain services providers. The Everest assessment praised IBM for platform configuration and ecosystem, ease of adoption, enterprise adoption and business value. While assessing 12 vendors, the top six was also the same as ABI Research’s tally.
The adoption of blockchain technologies in an enterprise context correlate closely with strategies for cloud infrastructure the better part of a decade ago. Enterprises, wrangling with other parts of their immense IT stacks, will want to take the complexity and danger out of blockchain deployment by utilising a suitable partner rather than building out their own systems. It is therefore no surprise that many of the largest cloud providers are conducting an arms race right now to establish supremacy.
“Both the BaaS markets and the digitailisation of industrial markets are fairly nascent phenomena,” explained Michela Menting, research director at ABI Research. “Often, the intersection of blockchain and industrial service offerings are only within the remit of large technology providers with mature cloud and Internet of Things offerings.
“As a result, only large companies play in the BaaS market, and all have varying levels of service offerings,” Menting added.
You can find out more about ABI Research’s industrial blockchain analysis here (client access required).
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