Today we announce that Chainyard has joined Hyperledger, adding to the positive momentum Hyperledger is experiencing. Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. It is a global collaboration, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology.
Hyperledger holds the distinction of being the fastest growing project launched by The Linux Foundation. Hyperledger now includes five different Blockchain framework projects: Hyperledger Fabric, Burrow, Iroha, Sawtooth and Indy and with the addition of over dozens of new members in the past few months, over 250 participating companies.
Chainyard’s membership in Hyperledger gives us more direct ability to contribute to the worldwide network of professionals who are working together to research, develop and advance blockchain technologies. Our membership means that our blockchain experts will have a comprehensive view and are on the leading edge when it comes to recommending new solutions and providing blockchain services.
We are very excited to be moving from a contributor to general member with Hyperledger. This gives us more opportunities to co-create value that will directly benefit the blockchain open source ecosystem
Isaac Kunkel, Chainyard VP of Consulting
Making the decision to join was easy since Hyperledger’s objectives of maintaining openness, transparency and interoperability of blockchain technologies reflects our own vision. We see the potential for blockchain to significantly alter existing business models by development of decentralized networks that facilitate business through decreased complexity, increased efficiency, improved security and potential for new revenue streams to benefit all members of the network.
After working with Hyperledger for nearly three years, we have made a strategic decision to participate in a way that reinforces our vision, strategy and commitment to the Hyperledger project and further contribute to the technology stack. The team helps to build, maintain and support the infrastructure necessary to develop the early releases of Fabric. In partnership with IBM, the framework for CI/CD/CT and other development, performance test and support activities are maintained.
This global journey has enabled us to meet with many Blockchain enthusiasts from Austin to Boston, New York to San Francisco and Toronto to Singapore. We have had the privilege of speaking at IBM’s Think Conferences, demoing at Consensus Conference and attending many other Blockchain conferences and meet-ups. Along the way, Hyperledger Fabric has matured, first with the GA release of Fabric 1.0 in July 2017, then the major upgrade release to Fabric 1.1 in March 2018 and most recently with the major upgrade release to Fabric 1.2 earlier this month, July 2018. The community releases are global in scale with efforts from hundreds of developers and dozens of companies. The collaboration of developers, scientists and businesses continue to push the platform forward to be the best choice for blockchain for business, that is, blockchain focused on permissioned, private networks built to solve business problems.
With the tremendous amount of collaboration going on in the community the technical acumen of the blockchain community has matured. This includes maturity in blockchain concepts, blockchain platform fundamentals, agile development practices, automated testing frameworks, performance testing frameworks, DevOps capabilities, cloud engineering and network security.
The growth has enabled POCs to transition to real world solutions across many disparate industries including financial, transportation, food, healthcare and mining. The platform and momentum have enabled us to work on solutions in supply chain including track-and-trace, procurement and compliance. With the combination of Hyperledger Fabric and IBM Blockchain Platform, we have built ready for prime-time business solutions.
Earlier this year we announced the launch of Chainyard, a wholly owned subsidiary of IT People Corporation. This was done to demonstrate our focus and commitment to blockchain technologies. Joining Hyperledger reinforces leadership’s commitment and focus on Blockchain for Business and our belief in the transformational nature of the technology. We are confident many others will be joining us in the future.
Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, today announced it has surpassed the 250 member mark with the addition of Chainyard.
Read more about Chainyard joining the Hyperledger here.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn
I have always been curious about how we manage releases of the Fabric images to the Hyperledger community for all the platforms consistently, continuously and with such efficiency since 2016. A couple of weeks ago, Chainyard sponsored and hosted the July JAM (Jenkins Triangle Area Meetup) Organized by the Cloud bees team. Our DevOps expert Ramesh Thoomu (Chainyard) and Will Refvem (Solution Architect) from CloudBees presented a session on Jenkins Job builder (JJB). Around 30 members from different organizations (CloudBees, Redhat, IBM etc.) joined the conversation.
Jenkins Job Builder is a tool to automate the Jenkins job configuration. This gives lot flexibility and consistent way of managing the jobs. JJB gives flexible options to manage jobs as shown below:
A Job configuration on Jenkins UI involves specifying Job Name, Description, Properties, Parameters, SCM, Triggers, Build Environment, Build and Post-build actions. A Hyperledger-Fabric project team is usually working on multiple branches across multiple build platforms. Take an example of a simple job, which one can trigger on “master”, “feature”, “development” branches and on “x86_64” and “s390x” platforms. This can end up creating 6 Jenkins Job on Jenkins UI. This process takes a lot of mouse clicks and results in creating redundant job configuration and manual process. Managing all these jobs is a cumbersome task and can introduce errors if the process is not consistent.
JJB can tremendously simplify the problem. Job templates use Job definitions and modules to fulfill all the above Jenkins job requirements. Within Hyperledge-Fabric release process, the team is successfully managing 100s of Jenkins jobs easily with Jenkins job templates supporting seamless release process. The newer version of JJB supports a Jenkins pipeline plugin which makes things easier to create a touch-less seamless integration on CI/CT/CD, avoiding redundant job configuration and managing the jobs using simple yaml or json formatted configuration files.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to participate in the annual National Retail Federation Tech 2018 conference in San Francisco, attended by over 100 C-Level Retail Execs. Earlier on Sunday, Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project, had briefed the CIO council about Hyperledger. The event kicked-off on Sunday with two fantastic key-note addresses. The first one by Amy Trask, CBS Sports Analyst and former CEO of the Oakland Raiders had one message – “understand your Fans” which in retail parlance translates to understanding your customers. At one point she talked about how she would spend her time in the stands with her fans rather than the special boxes. While understanding what the quantitative data is telling is important, qualitative data is as important if not more.
The second keynote was delivered by Shabnam Mogharabi, CEO of Soul Pancakes, a content creation company. Her entire message was about how to tell a good story that connects with your audience. The customer appreciated “positive uplifting content, filled with energy, liveliness and vibrancy”. There are “22 rules to story telling”. She added another dimension of “emotional data” to what Amy had said earlier. In order to tell an authentic story, one has to “create discomfort that leads to real + vulnerable stories”. A viral story is short lived impact but a story with a virus spreads and can sustain audience attention for longer periods of time.
Monday morning kicked off with Andrea Wasserman (VP of Retail Experience at Verizon). The first speaker was Katie Finnegan who kick started Walmart’s Store #8 initiative – an innovation center for understanding customer behavior to evolve future retail strategies. Each idea went thru a “Shark Tank” process where each selected candidate would present a “Point of View of the Future” as in a C-Series pitch. Once an idea is taken forward, that innovation was treated as a separate business with its own CEO and accounting head.
I heard concepts like story telling, content pitching, immersive retailing and PoC. The Store #8 incubation process follows a “design-> initiate-> build-> iterate-> minimum viable scale-> evaluate” approach.
Ajit Sivadasan of Lenovo stressed that while strategy discussions are great, executing the strategy is where the rubber hits the road. It took them several years to come to where they are today. Starting with collection of data and reporting, today they are at a point where they use AI and machine learning capabilities to gain insights. They had significant challenges at the beginning, but today they utilize data sciences to innovate or get answers that were previously not intuitive.
During the breakfast, I met Raghu Sagi, the Chief Engineering Officer of Sephora. I have to admit I am not keeping up with the trends and had to ask him what does Sephora do. Their strategy was to give the “lady” a connected experience throughout from home to the store or connecting with their friends and other users. A key to their strategy is to create individual experiences for each woman and simplifying the user experience across all channels.
Maryanne Byrdak, SVP & CIO of Potbelly said that while they are still dealing with legacy systems transformation, their strategy is to protect their brand and be selective on which channel they want to leverage. For example, they would not want their sandwiches delivered with some other brand food products in certain channels. For Potbelly its important to focus on the “Right Price, Right Time and Right Experience”.
Julie Averill , CTO of Lululemon shared an interesting story at Nordstrom about how IT was perceived as an “Electrical Closet” that only mattered when something went down. For Lululemon, business acumen, inspired partnership and strategic relationships with customers are important. She talked about “Speed to change and innovate”, “emotional fitness” and “accountable for commitments” as key to their business.
The CIO of Levi Strauss & Co, Chris Clark shared changes in the perception of IT as a partner who sits on the table with the business as opposed to being in the background as a service provider. The Strauss family is very interested in understanding technology trends and want it to be an integral factor in formulating business and financial plans.
Brandless is another startup that focuses on retail and feeding America through a community approach. According to Tina Sharkley, the founder, through supplier relationships and optimizing the supply chain and cost model, they have kept the pricing of any product at $3. They work with the community and through focus groups understand the needs and behavior of their customer.
Karen Etzkorn leads the Curate group (HSN, QVC, Zulily) and through acquisitions they have grown and also been saddled with disparate technologies. However, she points out that they are extracting the best from each of the entities and applying it across others. Agility and agile methods are very important to them and most importantly “making risk cheap”.
The most illustrative painting of the future came from Peter Schwartz of Salesforce. Kicking of his presentation with a clip from Minority Report, he said that the future will be touchless and based on based on sound, personal digital assistants and intelligent devices communicating with each other, They will understand every move the consumer and personalizing everything. Peter talked about individual personalization using Netflix as an example. At Netflix, they study individual behavior and make minor changes to the UX/UI to tailor the experience based on learning. For example, Peter watches war movies where the selection is limited and hence it tries to steer Peter towards other themes.
His presentation was preceded by two startups “Hingto” and “Lisnr” both looking at changing retail experiences. The theme of “Hingeto” was “anyone can make, anyone can design, anyone can ship, and anyone can buy anywhere” all without locking up inventory. On the other hand, “Lisnr” hopes to change experience including payments using near-ultrasonic, ultra-low power data transmission technology that enables fast, reliable, and secure communication between devices via any speaker and/or microphone.
I noticed that there was limited understanding of “Blockchain” among the attendees, and how it could disrupt the industry. I spoke with several folks including NRF, Sonoma-Williams, Ralph Lauren, Sephora, Zebra, Hughes, Remini, For Eyes, Richemont and Stein Mart about Enterprise Blockchain in Supply Chain. I had some detail chat with Janet Sherlock CEO of Ralph Lauren and Susan from American Eagle about supply chain settlements using blockchain to improve operational efficiencies, reduce disputes and eliminate reconciliations.
I attended the conference as the CTO of Chainyard which is the Technical Partner of Bleexy. @Argentina Moise, the CEO of Bleexy presented the vision of an integrated network of market places that leverage both public and private blockchains, enabled by smart contracts to initiate cross market place transactions and settlements. Bleexy provides a platform for retailers to collaborate in a trustless, transparent environment, yet support privacy and confidentiality. The Bleexy demo can be viewed by clicking here.
There was a presentation by Ryan Orr, co-founder of Chronicled about blockchain. He painted a weaker picture of several features such as key management and privacy still lacking in blockchains and that one in five who claim to be blockchain experts is bluffing. My strong feeling is that they work in the Ethereum space where many of these features have to be custom integrated to create private blockchains. Hyperledger-Fabric, while still advancing, provides native capability to address many of these challenges through the availability of channels, sideDB, service discovery, encryption on the chain, zero knowledge proofs, certificate authorities and member services and many more.
In summary, retail has several challenges in fast changing environment that include compliance with PCI, GDPR, protecting brand reputation, protecting, employees and understanding patterns of transactions. While many retailers are struggling with legacy systems and transformation, others see Amazon both as driving innovation at a a tremendous pace and a threat to their existence. Retail innovation is experimenting with several technologies such as chat bots, digital voice assistants, augmented reality, gamification approaches, avatars, social media, AI/ML and in store technologies such as smart devices, listeners, voice and facial recognition. Personalization is now at an individual level. Of course Price and Value are still very important. Innovations in retail have focused on several emerging technologies – data sciences being on the top.
The NRF has done a fabulous job of hosting this event. The event was held at the beautiful Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. The event kicked off on Sunday and gave plenty of opportunity to learn about the trends in retail. For a change, the sponsors did not have to put up booths and hang around which was a welcome relief. The breaks in between, the lunch, cocktail hour, dinner and post dinner cocktails all offered enough time to understand and chat with attendees. The food was excellent and had a variety for the foodie. Loved the interaction with the NRF Leadership. Thank you NRF for a beautiful event.
