Microsoft takes overall top spot in ABI Research’s Blockchain-as-a-Service competitive assessment
ABI Research named leading Blockchain-as-a-Service platform. Source: shutterstock.com
Ranked as the leading Blockchain-as-a-Service platform, Microsoft received the top spot followed closely by IBM, according to ABI Research’s Blockchain-as-a-Service Competitive Assessment report.
The Blockchain-as-a-Service competitive assessment ranked 11 vendors currently competing in the BaaS space: Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Cisco, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Tencent, based on ABI Research’s proven innovation/implementation criteria framework. 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.
Microsoft has been involved in blockchain projects since at least 2015, and today offers a host of services on its Azure cloud computing platform, the most notable of which is the Azure Blockchain Workbench. While Microsoft leads overall, it is followed very closely by IBM, which is marginally ahead in terms of innovation. The two firms are a league ahead of other vendors in terms of their BaaS offerings.
The rest of the assessed vendors are grouped loosely into a peloton, headed by SAP, and followed closely by Oracle and Cisco. As more recent reentrants into the market, all three have accelerated the commercialization of their offerings, providing feature-rich platforms, broad market range, dynamic ecosystem support, and integration with both their own and third-party solutions.
The remaining vendors also offer some interesting BaaS platforms, at varying stages of maturity and deployment, with the most recent, Huawei, launching only last month (October 2018). As such, their relative youth and the nascent nature of the BaaS market means that this current standing is likely to change very rapidly over the coming year.
