SAP Launches Two New Consortia to Improve Blockchain Customer Flexibility Integration

SAP Launches New Industry Consortia, Improves Blockchain Integration and Customer Flexibility

SAP has announced the launch of two new consortia that boosts industry-specific blockchain co-innovation with customers and partners.

The company also announced new services that help customers integrate different blockchain infrastructure seamlessly by offering same functionalities irrespective of their environment.

These services were announced at the SAP® TechEd event in Las Vegas, taking place Oct. 2–5, 2018.

With the improvements comes support for Quorum, an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum, to offer more flexibility and complement the existing support of Hyperledger Fabric and MultiChain on the SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain service. Now customers can use Ethereum-based smart contracts in permissioned blockchain networks, thanks to Quorum support.

Commenting Gil Perez, senior vice president, Products & Innovation, and head of digital customer initiatives at SAP said Blockchain presents a powerful way to create greater trust, transparency and simplified collaboration among businesses. Adding that SAP empowers customers to harness the value of blockchain by offering easy integration, technological flexibility and industry-specific co-innovation. SAP has formed two new industry consortium groups within the SAP Blockchain Consortium program: one for the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industries, and the other for agribusiness, consumer products and retail.

The consortia bring SAP customers, partners, and other relevant players together to identify industry-spanning blockchain use cases, areas for cross-industry collaboration and further benefits of permissioned industry blockchain networks. The two new groups are in addition to the high-tech industry consortium, which has more than doubled in size since its founding earlier this year. SAP's expanding work with blockchain comes as companies in more industries seek the advantages of the distributed ledger technology in enterprise applications.