UPDATED 11:19 EDT / MAY 17 2019

BLOCKCHAIN

Use cases get real with enterprise-ready blockchain service

Developers and enterprises are weary of blockchain hype. They want ready-to-go blockchain for real applications, results and profit. They’re pulling blockchain out of the cryptocoin rut and setting it on General Data Protection Regulation compliance, supply chain issues, anonymous content sharing, and more.

Many companies start out with high hopes for blockchain, and then slam into nasty scalability and operations bulwarks, according to Mike DiPetrillo (pictured, left), senior director of blockchain at VMware Inc.

We go into account after account where they’ve chosen some blockchain solution that’s out there and become what I call a ‘stalled pioneer,'” DiPetrillo said. They may develop an application but can’t get it through the checks for security and data privacy, for instance.

VMware sought to work these issues out to enable blockchain use cases. It began with the open-source Project Concord. Then, it built a managed service around it called VMware Blockchain. It not only solves scalability and operations problems, but also whacks at a particularly tricky problem that has held back blockchain in the GDPR.

DiPetrillo and Pratima Rao Gluckman (pictured, right), engineering leader of blockchain at VMware, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the RADIO event in San Francisco. They discussed blockchain’s maturation in the enterprise and its use cases outside of cryptocurrency (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Blockchain gets stuff done

Blockchain’s distributed ledger would be a shoe-in for GDPR compliance if not for its immutability, which is at odds with GDPR’s “right to be forgotten” rule. VMware Blockchain addresses this with an engineering tweak.

“If I trust that I want to be able to delete that data, and we reach consensus on it, and we still maintain the proper order of the bits — which is really what blockchain is doing — it’s giving you trust on that order of bits,” DiPetrillo said. “I agree as a consensus to delete one of those pieces out of the order of bits, and we can still maintain trust of the order of bits.”

Dell EMC (owner of VMware) is using VMware blockchain for supply chain in its environmentally aware Ocean Plastics project.

“It’s been predicted that we’ll have more plastic in our oceans than fish by 2050,” Gluckman said. Dell is doing its part to prevent this by recycling plastic from the ocean for use in its laptops. Dell developers coded the app with VMware Blockchain in two weeks with no support issues, according to Gluckman.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RADIO event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the VMware RADIO 2019 event. Neither VMware Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU