Fresh off becoming a member of the open source Hyperledger blockchain project overseen by The Linux Foundation, Syncsort has revealed plans to provide data quality and management tools that will enable organizations deploying blockchain networks to more easily leverage data residing in enterprise applications.
Syncsort CTO Tendü Yoğurtçu says as enthusiasm for blockchain networks continues to rise, many organizations will soon be wrestling with a broad range of integration issues.
“Blockchain technologies are not going to exist in isolation,” says Yoğurtçu. “They are not silos on their own.”
In fact, Yoğurtçu notes, one of the first use cases for blockchain networks involves digital supply chains consisting of a wide range of applications that already generate massive amounts of data. The next major challenge will be harmonizing all that data in a way that smart contracts based on a blockchain network can consume it, notes Yoğurtçu.
In much the same way Syncsort rose to prominence helping organizations migrate data in and out of mainframes, Yoğurtçu says there’s a clear opportunity to provide similar capabilities for blockchain networks. It may take a while for blockchain networks to become pervasively deployed across the enterprise, but Yoğurtçu notes that use cases for blockchain technologies will soon expand well beyond digital supply chains. There is also a wide range of governance, usability and scalability issues surrounding blockchain technologies that must be addressed, adds Yoğurtçu.
Of course, Hyperledger is only one kind of blockchain network. It’s probable that most organizations will find themselves using multiple classes of blockchain networks in much the same way they employ different types of databases today. As such, blockchain integration issues are likely to be manifold in the years ahead. Blockchain technologies may have got their start being employed to drive cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. But as organizations begin to separate the underlying blockchain technologies from cryptocurrencies, it may very well turn out that the need for an immutable database to keep track of transactions and events will expand into everything from human resources to cybersecurity a lot sooner than most anyone yet fully appreciates.
