Almost 21,000 visitors from 51 countries assisted to the 3rd edition of the Digital Enterprise Show (DES) 2018 that is now consolidated as the ‘Davos‘ of the digital economy and transformation. DES opened its doors from May 22nd to May 24th, 2018 at the IFEMA in Madrid, to companies that have begun their digital transformation process, adapting their products and services to work with new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud, cybersecurity and blockchain.
Companies adopting and working with blockchain.
More than 130 companies showed up at the event and among those already working within the blockchain industry are:
Huobi: one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms in the world and the only exchange present at the event. Their stand offered information about the services they offer on their platform and digital material to help users understand their product even without a background in cryptocurrencies. For more information, you can read here the Huobi conference article of May 23rd, 2018.
T-System: a German IT services multinational that operates in 27 countries and has a global and international blockchain competition center segmented by industry, where they have developed such technology in the financial and insurance environment (making transactions simpler and safer), public administration through the CityPass Solution, logistics and services (certifying denomination of origin and quality), human resource management (CV verification) and even in Industry 4.0, reducing the time to verify quality processes.
Alisys: a company that offers technological solutions such as AI, machine learning, cloud and digital marketing for B2B digital transformation. They offer a certification system for recording the so-called operators who work in Ethereum (thanks to smart contracts) so that companies have greater ease and reliability in their certification processes. They are members of Alastria, a semi-public consortium formed by 160 companies and institutions tasked with creating a blockchain ecosystem in Spain.
IBM: the American multinational company was not far behind with a stand that offered free coffee and showed game development in the Hyperledger Fabric demonstrating international coffee sales recorded in the blockchain. The game shows how blockchain can record, with great detail and transparency, coffee sales across the world.
Blockchain Series: three hours of presentations on blockchain in the r-Evolution theater.
The convention had at least 10 event rooms where continual presentations focused on transformation and digital economy topics. Blockchain had its opportunity on May 24th, during which there were three hours of presentations and debates held about the future of blockchain. The most interesting presentations were:
Olga Blanco – Blockchain Leader / IBM
- IBM anticipates that future companies will work in a single blockchain.
- In 10 years all documentation of international transport will be in smart contracts, reducing the process time from 21 days to 8 hours for goods validation.
- IBM is working on its own blockchain platform to operate cross-industry.
- There are already consortiums of banks like we-trade.com which are developing blockchain financial platforms.
- The NGOs want to implement donation systems with blockchain so that donors can see exactly the destination of their money.
Daniel Diez – Global Head of Blockchain / UST Global
- Data is a commodity, the network (blockchain) is the product.
- Users now will be the owners of the data, businesses will only have access.
- The economy will be tokenized where an apartment will be equal to an intelligent contract.
Martha Bennett – IT industry analyst / Forrester Research
- We are still in the ‘wild west’ of the industry, it’s your childhood.
- Blockchain will create a debate between transparency Vs privacy and confidentiality.
- It will also create a debate on immutability Vs exception management.
The executives who exhibited in this event agreed that blockchain will open the doors to new sources of financing for entrepreneurs, improve the efficiency of process certification, lower costs and improve time in operations, and of course, will allow for the creation of new businesses that increase the income of corporations.
