What is Blockchain?

Home Menu

Back Oracle Account

Cloud Account Sign in to Cloud

No Results Found

Your Search did not match any results

Blockchain builds a growing list of unalterable records (called blocks) that are linked together to form a chain that is securely distributed among participants. It allows organizations that might not fully trust each other to agree on a single, distributed source of truth.

Blockchain minimizes the cost and delays of using third-party intermediaries for financial transactions. It also eliminates manual, error-prone processes, and information redundancy.

Why Should You Care?
Blockchain has the potential to fundamentally transform global businesses across multiple industries. It enables a trusted business network to transact directly over a peer-to-peer network—without the delays and cost of third parties—while still ensuring the validity and integrity of the transactions.

Blockchain offers a ready-to-go, enterprise-grade solution that enables businesses to increase business velocity, extend enterprise boundaries, and reduce operational costs.

“This will enable customers to extend their current Oracle ERP and SaaS solutions to use trusted business networks for securely conducting B2B transactions in real-time across their ecosystem of trading partners.”

—Indranil Mukherjee, Vice President, Head of Oracle Practice, Infosys

Blockchain Challenges for Enterprises

Open source blockchain software is difficult to set up due to the required security and infrastructure dependencies
It is expensive and complex to integrate diverse data sources with enterprise business applications
Blockchain requires enterprise-grade resilience, scalability, security, and performance
Open source software—such as Hyperledger—innovates rapidly so keeping the platform up to date is challenging
Monitoring can be expensive due to ongoing disaster recovery, backups, restores, and patching

Blockchain versus Centralized Databases

Blockchain does not require a central administrator. In contrast, a traditional (SQL or NoSQL) database is controlled by a single entity. It’s an important difference that means:

Every node in a blockchain independently verifies and processes every transaction
Blockchain-powered transactions and data are extremely fault-tolerant due to their built-in redundancy
Updates are agreed upon by the participants before they are committed, as opposed to a typical database environment where the updates are committed by each party and then reconciled
The overall performance of a blockchain is near real-time because there are no delays from a central clearing house or reconciliation processing

Hyperledger and Blockchain

Hyperledger is an open source project started by the Linux Foundation to advance cross-industry collaboration of blockchain technologies. As part of its commitment to help enterprises realize the benefits of blockchain, Oracle has joined this global effort. By leveraging open source and maintaining interoperability with core protocols, Oracle will enable customers to drive the direction and pace of integration across business systems.

Inaugural Hyperledger Global Forum Showcases Strong Community Momentum