According to Jerry Cuomo, the VicePresident of IBM blockchain technologies, the enterprise feature is an enabler of spending big money.

“It is driving additional spend,”
“When you look at the direct attribution of the actual dollars spent on blockchain, we are seeing that for every dollar spent, $15 is spent on other cloud services.”

This is perhaps a hint on IBM’s current business strategy, as it tries to bring enterprise blockchain closer to the company’s cloud offering. IBM might try to pivot their business plans as distributed ledgers are losing some of the initial hype all around the world.

IBM’s VP believes that blockchain is only 20% of a blockchain application and the rest of the solutions lays in other technologies.

“Blockchain is a new class of enterprise application,”
“It plays into trends like app modernization and new cloud-native applications, data and analytics. It crosses all those things.”

IBM’s business strategy is shifting massively after last year’s acquisition of the open-source software, Red Hat. In their last quarter of 2019, IBM posted about their unexpected revenue growth: Red Hat had 24% revenue growth and the cloud and cognitive software revenue grew with 9%.

As Cuomo stated regarding the shift in priorities:

IBM has “put its chips down on the table in a very aggressive way around the hybrid space.”

What is a hybrid cloud?

According to McKinsey & Company, the hybrid cloud is a combo of on-premise, public and private cloud, which allows for different workloads to be handled across the different platforms. The hybrid cloud market is worth $1.2 trillion.

Can blockchain and the cloud work together?

The IBM VP talked about a symbiosis between blockchain and cloud, which will unite Hyperledger Fabric, a Linux incubator for blockchain enterprise projects, and Kubernetes, a hybrid cloud platform which automates clusters of services. The latter is a field of expertise for Red Hat.

“Hyperledger Fabric works well with Kubernetes,”
“Many of the things we’ve done around Chaincode, which is the way we plug smart contracts into Fabric, is to make sure it runs really well on that type of containerized environment with buttoned-down security. Red Hat gave us that motivation.”

Jerry Cuomo, the VicePresident of IBM blockchain technologies, described 2018 as “more of a Wild West,” he added:

“We had a lot of projects. Some would hit, others missed. The ideas weren’t always completely baked. Going into 2020, clients continue to get smarter.”

The fact remains, the enterprise blockchain world has seen some development lately. Might there yet be some bloodletting on the blockchain side at IBM? 

Cuomo says no: “We are very healthy here in blockchain land.”