R3 Partners With IBM To Scale Its Services Across Hybrid Cloud

On October 22, IBM announced their new partnership with R3, aiming to expand clients’ choice for scaling blockchain technology while providing high levels of performance, compliance, and security.

In order to bring Corda to IBM’s LinuxONE, the company announced an open beta, starting November 2, 2020, which will assist in integrating the technology “both on-premises and the IBM Cloud,” via IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services. IBM stated that general availability will likely be happening in Q1 next year.

According to the announcement, IBM Services will be expanding their existing Corda capabilities by establishing a so-called R3 center of excellence, which will provide the required services to IBM clients that plan to adopt R3 solutions in the future. Corda solution architects, strategy and design consultants, and subject matter experts will be available to help users advance their network and solution deployment.

“This center of excellence is being designed to innovate and incubate client-requested ideas and use cases leveraging IBM’s deep expertise in developing and standing up commercially available production grade blockchain networks,” said Jason Kelley, General Manager of IBM Blockchain Services. “We will use IBM methods, including design thinking, to focus efforts on developing interoperability solutions for disparate blockchain networks, digital assets and currencies and industry-focused use cases.”

IBM claimed that, as enterprises in regulated industries are increasingly looking to build blockchain solutions with advanced security and data privacy features, clients with highly sensitive data and workloads could utilize IBM LinuxONE in order to secure them “at the highest level commercially available”. IBM LinuxONE and IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services also provide ‘Keep Your Own Key’ workload encryption capabilities backed by FIPS 140-2 Level 4 certification, allowing for encryption of all data at-rest and in-flight.

In the announcement, IBM also expressed their desire to work with various other clients across industry ecosystems with the goal of “advancing a network of networks to a hybrid of hybrids.” Moreover, the infrastructure support for R3’s Corda will complement existing blockchain services on IBM to provide organizations with more opportunities to access strategic partnerships and resources to accelerate growth.

“Corda Enterprise and IBM LinuxONE bring together IBM’s best security, efficiency and scalability features in blockchain and hybrid cloud. The result is assurance that customers can run their most sensitive workloads with transparency and flexibility,” said David E. Rutter, CEO of R3 “Blockchain is fast emerging as the technology of choice to drive digital transformation and R3 and IBM will provide access to the privacy and security inherent in blockchain technology underpinned by IBM LinuxONE.”