Cisco, a multinational technology conglomerate headquartered in the center of Silicon Valley, recently published a report on blockchain technology outlaying the importance of blockchain, how it’s transforming businesses, the future of the blockchain industry, and Cisco’s role in the blockchain ecosystem.
Blockchain: The Tech Breakthrough Megatrend
Cisco’s report starts off by explaining just how big the innovative technology of blockchain really is, and what the future of this industry is shaping up to be.
Per the report and according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), global spending on blockchain technology is expected to reach around $2.9 billion in 2019 as industries everywhere investigate ways to use blockchain to increase trust and address challenges around complexity, transparency, and security.
Taking a long-term outlook on the blockchain industry, Cisco provided some insightful estimations that showcase the depth of this industry and how it’s expected to grow.
According to Cisco, 83% of executives believe trust is the cornerstone of the digital economy, and it’s expected that the blockchain market will reach $9.7 billion by 2021. Cisco also stated that 10% of the global GDP is likely to be stored on blockchains by 2027.
What’s Driving the Blockchain Revolution
According to Cisco and data from IDC, the blockchain industry is poised to grow bigger and bigger as it lays the foundation for the era of a programmable economy that’s expected to deliver efficiencies and new business value in excess of $3 trillion by 2030.
Per the report, a big driver in this blockchain revolution has to do with the rise of the API economy and how technology is used in enterprise businesses. While technology has advanced, methods of doing business over the internet are experiencing increasing problems.
As put in Cisco’s report:
“Today’s organizations must increasingly manage data and transactions among a large number of untrusted parties, creating business challenges around transparency, complexity, and security.”
Therefore, what’s driving the blockchain revolution is the technology’s innovations in transparency, complexity, and security.
Transparency, Complexity, Security
Transparency
Our current technological systems lack transparency, and Cisco’s report highlights this as a major problem in global supply chains. As it currently stands, a product’s journey lacks visibility and presents challenges in tracing its origins, with serious implications to counterfeiting, health, and safety.
For example, Cisco notes that counterfeiting is estimated to cost US-based semiconductor companies more than $7.5 billion per year.
Complexity
In today’s world, global trade and commerce involve multiple intermediaries such as brokers, financial institutions, and other third parties that lead to a substantial increase in the cost of doing business. One example noted in the report is that suppliers in emerging markets pay interest on receivable financing as high as 30%.
Security
A major problem in today’s technological systems and infrastructure is the centralized nature of information which provides hackers with a single point to attack and gain control. A big reason decentralization is important is because 20 billion devices making up the Internet of Things (IoT) are set to be online by 2020, representing a significant number of attack surfaces.
As explained in Cisco’s report, blockchain technology provides significant increases in the 3 areas mentioned above, offering considerable benefits for both enterprise businesses and the global economy in a world that’s becoming more and more digitized.
“Blockchain-based technologies can build a foundation for trust in the enterprise through the digitization of business processes, tokenization of assets, and codification of complex contracts. These technologies can enable business ecosystems, consisting of both internal and external partners, to securely interact and transact without human intervention and dramatically simplify operations for large enterprises.”
Do you agree with what’s said in Cisco’s report? Is blockchain technology the greatest technological advancement of our time? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
