Oracle's First Dozen Cloud Blockchain Applications Are Now Live

Despite years of hype and chatter, enterprise blockchain deployments actually in production are few and far between.

Announced Monday, the software giant now has up to a dozen enterprise customers using live applications that have sped into production since its cloud-based blockchain platform went live last July.

Previously, the only major enterprise blockchains in production were built using IBM Blockchain.

"Other vendors may still be experimenting but we do have real customers in live production. I would say around 10 to a dozen are in a live situation."

By "In production," Xiong said he means these applications have their own end users and are handling live transactions.

Xiong said the GSBN consortium grew out of Oracle's close partnership with CargoSmart, an independent software vendor that put the consortium together.

It's fine to see Oracle going great guns with Hyperledger Fabric, but one criticism.

Asked if this was a fair comment, Xiong pointed out that Oracle has been working on Fabric for over a year and contributed a number of bug fixes.

Oracle worked out certain enhancements around the database, said Xiong, specifically switching out Fabric's Level DB and using Oracle's Berkeley DB which, he said, has better performance and richer querying capabilities.

Measure for measure, Oracle is open to collaborating with IBM and others when it comes to blockchain, Xiong said.