For the longest of whiles Microsoft and IBM were seen as the two leading platforms for enterprise blockchain development, but there is a sense that Redmond may have taken the pole position.
Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) are seen as the next big thing in the world of technology — even as their adoption is still on the slow side in this earliest of phases.
However, in a ranking compiled by market foresight advisory firm ABI Research, Microsoft has taken the top spot by managing to beat the competitors owing to the advantage it has on the actual implementation side of things.
It offers a wide range of services on its blockchain platform.
ABI Research wrote about this, revealing how it assessed the 11 companies:
“Each vendor was analyzed on innovation metrics such as market penetration, proof of concepts and pilots, and ecosystem support, and implementation metrics such as platform diversity, primary features, developer resources, and integration with their own solutions.”
The fact that Microsoft’s BaaS platform is deeply integrated with its Azure cloud services also plays heavily into all this — Azure does, after all, commands the second largest market share globally in the public cloud market.
Big Blue, obviously, came in second.
Both Microsoft and IBM offerings were buoyed by the fact that they have been in the blockchain game far longer than most other vendors including the likes of Huawei and Oracle. Amazon, Alibaba, Baidu, Cisco, SAP, HPE and Tencent rounded out the spots.
The report stresses that both Microsoft and IBM are capitalizing on the various pilots and proof of concepts that have been tested in the past 2 years, with both offering a broad range of platform choices and deep integration with their existing cloud services.
And while IBM has some of the most advanced pilots to date, Microsoft is leading on the implementation front.
