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VMblog Expert Interview: Vendia Talks Blockchain Benefits and Challenges and the Marriage of Cloud + Blockchain

interview-vendia-wagner-rao 

The potential for blockchain technology for businesses is huge as it can help with supply chain tracking, financial transactions and closing data silos across partners and customers. However, most traditional blockchain solutions fail in an enterprise setting. Why? Because they made a crucial strategic mistake: They completely ignore the cloud.

To learn more, VMblog spoke to Vendia co-founders, Dr. Tim Wagner and Shruthi Rao.

VMblog:  What are some of the benefits for businesses when they use blockchain technology?

Vendia:  If you've seen empty shelves in stores, you know why the world needs better data sharing solutions. In 2022, 80% of business data lives outside a company's 4 walls due to Super Specialization. This means that across global supply chains, public clouds, and SaaS vendors, application data is now fully distributed and largely out of central IT's control. To survive, and certainly to thrive, businesses need to become great at effectively sharing data with their suppliers, logistics partners, manufacturing partners, marketers, channels, and more. Unfortunately, the tools to make this sharing process seamless today are seriously lacking.Blockchain is the perfect solution to these data problems - the promise of blockchain is the ability to share data quickly and securely while also enabling data owners to retain control; that's the key idea behind decentralization. In fact, a recent survey from Deloitte found that 86 percent of executives believe there's huge business potential in blockchain technology.

VMblog:  What have some of the challenges been for companies that do attempt to use blockchain?

Vendia:  First generation blockchains like Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric continue to fail in enterprise settings because they're too slow, too expensive, and too hard to use. Enterprise blockchain applications require integration with other enterprise systems to work. This means that legacy systems, applications, and data-sets need to integrate seamlessly, which is a big problem if you and your partners are using different providers. Enterprises also require crisp data modeling and governance, two other weaknesses of first generation blockchains. Because of these missing features, IT teams attempting to adopt blockchain technology are immediately forced into problem solving mode just to get their applications up and running. It takes an average of 6-12 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars just to set up the initial blockchain infrastructure for most businesses...and that's before any value has been realized. 

VMblog:  What are the biggest differences between traditional blockchains like Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric and next generation blockchains like Vendia?

Vendia:  Traditional blockchains continue to fail because they've made a crucial strategic mistake: They completely ignored the cloud. Vendia has fixed all of the implementation problems businesses have experienced with first generation blockchains with a new technology: a cloud native, serverless blockchain. Vendia is the world's fastest and most scalable way to share business data across applications, clouds, and partners. Additionally, it addresses all of the implementation woes of traditional chains, such as easy built-in data modeling, and can be deployed in minutes instead of months. It can scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions instead of a few hundred, and that works even when the public cloud has a bad day.

VMblog:  What are some examples of specific industries and how they are using and benefiting from using next generation blockchains?

Vendia:  Industries across the board are experiencing game-changing business benefits by using next gen blockchain technology. From enabling airlines to give customers the best itineraries at the best price all in real-time, to mending the global supply chain crisis, leading companies are using Vendia for a variety of business use cases. For example, BMW uses Vendia to track and reconcile defects in multiple parts of their supply chain. As a result, BMW gained better insight into each stage of its supply chains and can better assign costs associated with damages along the line. Similarly, Aerotrax Technologies uses Vendia to connect with partners across the Aviation, Aerospace, and Defense supply chain. With Vendia they have created a frictionless customer onboarding experience and significantly reduced sales cycles.

VMblog:  What are some of the indicators you've seen since starting Vendia that this marriage of cloud + blockchain is a game changing combination for businesses?

Vendia:  When we started Vendia in 2020, our mission was to make it seamless for businesses to share code and data across applications, data stores, clouds, geographies, tech stacks, and even partners in an efficient and scalable way that wouldn't break the bank. Since then, the demand for this perfect marriage of blockchain and serverless cloud computing has only increased. We've seen that demand clearly reflected in Vendia's rapid customer and revenue growth. In the last 12 months alone, more than half of our customers replaced a failed blockchain project with Vendia and as a company, Vendia has experienced 16X growth in annual recurring revenue and a 550% increase in new customers.

VMblog:  Vendia just announced its Series B funding round for $30M. What's next for the business?

Vendia:  This latest round brings our total funding to over $50M, and it will help us grow our internal teams, invest in our go-to-market engine, as well as scale partnerships and new areas of compliance certifications. We continue to make updates to our services and offerings including our recent beta launch of Azure Files storage support, furthering our multi-cloud capabilities.

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Published Wednesday, July 27, 2022 7:30 AM by David Marshall
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