Many business leaders have a much better understanding of blockchain technology than just a couple of years ago. There's been a surge in R&D, both internally and in partnership with third parties, and a recognition that blockchain has the potential to be deployed in a variety of commercial use cases.
As the number of blockchain research projects increased, awareness among the pilot participants and elsewhere in their industries gained momentum. Now other companies are beginning to consider whether they, too, should seek to gain a competitive advantage from a proof-of-concept deployment.
Blockchain market development
According to the latest worldwide market study by Juniper Research, 65 percent of survey respondent enterprises with over 10,000 employees are considering or actively engaged in blockchain deployment. This marks a significant rise from 2017 when the corresponding figure was 54 percent.
Moreover, nearly a quarter of companies considering deploying blockchain had moved beyond proof-of-concept into trials and commercial rollouts, with dramatic diversification in use cases over the past year.
Only 15 percent of proposed deployments were now related to payments – compared with 34 percent last year – with significant interest in opportunities across diverse fields including logistics, authentication and smart contracts.
The study findings also identified savings and cost reductions across a range of verticals in areas such as compliance and fraud reduction, including a forecast of more than $100 billion by 2030 in food exports.
The survey results revealed that nearly half of companies were considering using Ethereum as their blockchain; reflecting the fact that its token standardization has enabled the creation of an ecosystem of distributed applications (dApps) to be built on its chain.
Furthermore, all the responding companies which had already invested over $100,000 in blockchain indicated they would be spending at least this amount again on the technology over the next 12 months.
According to the Juniper assessment, this demonstrated initial C-suite feedback had been largely positive in most cases, sufficiently so for executives deciding to move to the next stage of integration. That said, three-quarters of respondents expect some disruption to internal or external systems.
Outlook for blockchain applications
"The findings illustrate the need for companies to engage in a prolonged period of parallel running new systems alongside the old, to resolve any issues that might arise," said James Moar, senior analyst at Juniper Research. Regardless, we should anticipate more blockchain application development in the future.
The survey participants also acknowledged IBM as the leading vendor for blockchain project planning and deployment, with the tech giant ranked first by 65 percent of respondents — that's nearly 10 times more than the second-place vendor, Microsoft (7 percent).