Big Changes Ahead for Oracle Blockchain

With Enterprise blockchain deployments really beginning to take shape as more applications are launched and those already in production reach bigger networks and achieve larger transaction volumes, Oracle has recently announced the second generation of Oracle Blockchain Cloud Platform.

With that announcement comes news of new features and changes to pricing. I think it's fair to say that Oracle was a little late to the blockchain party, but we are increasingly receiving enquiries from customers and partners about integrating blockchain-based workflows and integrations into their existing Oracle ERP business processes. In fact, we have some very interesting projects developing around supply chain governance, manufacturing lineage and quality assurance.

We see it as a very positive step that Oracle is changing its pricing metrics from a transaction based model to one that is based on OCPU-hour. In our experience, transaction based models, with accompanying "minimum usage thresholds", have been blockers to adoption. When customers are experimenting and running pilots, transaction-based pricing is elastic and affordable but, as workloads move to production and transaction rates become much higher customers want more predictable pricing, which is not dependent on external transactions. OCPU-hour based pricing metrics meet this need.

Blockchain technologies in an ERP world will only truly succeed through seamless integrations with those ERP platforms, so we wait with interest to see how Oracle's end to end proposition develops.

Nonetheless, these are exciting times and it's my prediction that in the next year or two, blockchain will progress from edge technology into mainstream solutions.

To learn more about the latest developments to Oracle Blockchain Cloud Platform and the benefits for customers read this Oracle blog post.