Teaming Up Are IBM, KPMG, Merck, Walmart For Drug Supply Chain Blockchain Pilot

IBM, KPMG, Merck, And Walmart: What Does The Tie Up Focus On?

As experts watch closely the announcement of the latest blockchain initiative, saw IBM in partnership with KPMG, Merk, and Walmart building a drug supply chain blockchain pilot. As they move through a supply chain, these companies come together helping come up with a solution tracking certain drugs. Acting as the technology partner is IBM where KPMG brings a deep understanding of the compliance issues with Merk as a drug company and Walmart as a drug distributor through the pharmacies and care clinics. The main idea behind this is to track through the supply chain from manufacturer to pharmacy to consumer as each drug package has a unique identifier. While companies are loathing to share any data it seems simple enough as the blockchain would provide what is an irrefutable record for each transaction as the drug moved all along the supply chain thereby giving authorities and participants with an easy audit trail. 

At the request of the FDA, the pilot comes to be a part of a set of programs being conducted by various stakeholders. Complying with the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act, the end goal is to find solutions whereas according to FDA Pilot Program website, the FDA’s DSCSA Pilot Project Program focuses in assisting drug supply chain stakeholders thereafter developing the electronic, interoperable system identifying and tracing the prescription drugs distributed within the US.

In this scenario building, a blockchain platform or network on top of which other companies can build applications is what IBM hopes with its blockchain pilot. According to a global blockchain solutions leader for healthcare and life sciences at IBM Mark Treshock, it is in this case that the network would have the ability to thereby exchange information about the pharmaceutical shipments in a way ensuring privacy where it is validated. While there are people saying blockchain comes as a solution for the problem, IBM looks at it more practical as there are several real-world projects in production that include the one to track leafy greens from the field to store with Walmart and a shipping supply chain with Maersk to track those shipping containers moving throughout the world. 

Hereafter with the Walmart food blockchain, Treshock believes it is particularly applicable as also used as a template of sorts building the drug supply blockchain. He further explains they are very similar in tracking food to tracking drugs as they leverage and adopt the assets built for food trust to the problem. Adapting it to track pharmaceuticals is what they are taking the platform to. 

Here Is Kadena Bringing Free Private Blockchain Service 

Continuing to push the technology forward, companies like Kadena has been working on enterprise-grade solutions for some time while the hype around blockchain seems to have cooled a bit. Announcing that Kadena Scalable Permissioned Blockchain on Azure, the start-up brings it for free in the Azure Marketplace. Thereafter the co-founder and CEO of Kadena, Will Martino has today announced building on the success of the earlier similar endeavor involving AWS. He says that the private chain is thereby designed for enterprise use while it is designed for high performances and integration with traditional back ends. They are servicing almost all of the enterprise blockchain market by bringing the chain to AWS Marketplace as also Microsoft Azure taking place in the cloud. 

Further building a Proof of Concept without making a significant investment in the tooling, the free product, therefore, enables companies to get comfortable with the technology as it provides 2000 transactions a second across four nodes. The company makes money when it figures this out and wants to scale whereas Martino recognizes that technology is still immature as companies need to get comfortable with it. Therefore, this is what the free versions on the cloud platforms like Azure comes to be encouraging. 

Combining both public and private chains, Martino says Kadenafavors a hybrid approach to enterprise blockchain where in his view it gives the customers the best of both worlds. According to him, running a smart contract on the public Chainweb protocol which is being launched and the smart contracts being linked to a cluster of private permission chain nodes running the other half of the application. Here it thereby allows you with all of the market access as openness and transparency as also ownerlessness of the public network together with having the control and security which you find in a private network. 

The Conclusion

Working on early blockchain projects at J P Morgan, Martino and cofounder Stuart Popejoy left to start Kadena as the company raised around $ 14.9 million to date.