Channelweb.co.uk invited top executives from nine VARs to feature in their CRN article around the technologies they believe will take-off in 2019
David Leyland, director of solutions gives us his thoughts on blockchain technology
I’ve heard it quoted by three significantly important players that blockchain will do for transactions what the internet did for data. Blockchain allows us to have a distributed ledger mechanism where all transactions can be verified and therefore the risks of fraud and all the other things that go wrong with transactions can be massively mitigated, if not negated.
How big is the market for this technology?
Potentially anybody who transacts anything electronically could benefit from blockchain, so the market is enormous – I couldn’t even guess it.
If you think of property transactions: being able to deal with the way expensive assets are perceived as being undervalued in the market because of the complexity of completing the transaction. If you built a blockchain mechanism around it, every single thing along the line for that property could be managed through and the value realised.
Is it a fast-growing segment of the datacentre sector?
I think so, only because it potentially solves all kinds of problems. Like everything, it depends on how it’s deployed and all the normal caveats. Potentially it could solve things as simple as basic fraud, but I think there will be a whole bunch of other use cases for it which we probably haven’t even understood yet.
Is your business making it a focus?
At the moment the market doesn’t really exist. Our job is to enable our clients to realise the solution not just flog some tech. My job is to keep a close eye on how fast this unfolds, so I watch with great interest the way blockchain is working.
What is driving this demand?
Because of the extent of cyber risk in all forms of transactions and because of the way that everybody is driving down the digitised future, blockchain potentially solves all kinds of problems to make sure that there is still surety in those processes while accelerating them.
