035 – Blockchain and integration

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Blockchain has been one of the hottest trends in the last few years. It said that it would be a way to improve trust between organizations. It seems like people want to understand what it can do. I think it can be a little difficult really to understand what is going on in the area and what the benefit of it is.

In this episode of the Integration Podcast, I’m interviewing Stephan Nilsson from Unisot(The Universal Source Of Truth). Stephan has been working a long time in the SAP Integration space and we even had some time to work on a project together a long time ago. Now he is working with SAP Integration Architecture and Blockchain, so the perfect candidate so share what blockchain can be used to in an enterprise setting.

I have not seen much use in using blockchain and value in having a distributed database. In the podcast i did learn about some interesting apsects of what it can do.

Stephan and Unisot were working with making it easy to integrate directly from SAP ERP that could then transmit invoice and another document directly into the blockchain. They are using BDI (a blockchain version of EDI) to transport the data. They are mapping the documents to UBL which is a global standard for exchange business documents. So it should be simple to get started with it.

The choise come to choise which blockchain to use. They have used Bitcon SV(Satoshi’s Vision) which is able to handle many transactions pr second at a low cost. It is a public chain that everybody can access. Your documents can only be decrypted by the parties you want to see the data. So you can share data with your partner and the tax authories. It also support smart contracts so you can have payments as a part of the process.

We did talk about SAPs different blockchains products. Stephans though on this was that they are essentially just replicated databases and something that you have in a trusted network of partners.

We also talked about the business cases for it. During the 6 months, he had gotten many requests from people to ask if a problem can be solved by blockchain. It was not the other way around to start with blockchain and then find something to solve it with. We covered an example of how the salmon industry could use blockchain, so consumers could see the full lifecycle of the fish they are buying. This will allow premium vendors to take more for their product to show history.

Sorry for the bad audio, i hope it can provide some value for you.