With the emergence of BlockChain technology making gains in the marketplace. Is Laserfiche working to implement solutions that will utilize or integrate with this underlying technology.
Are you talking about integrating with cryptocurrencies or more general distributed ledgers? If the latter, who are running the nodes in your scenario? What business problems are you looking to solve?
Hi Brian
This question has come to us from a Financial Institution which as an industry is reviewing how BlockChain technologies may be implemented with or become the underlying framework of future systems. I do not have specifics but I would think it would have more to do with distributed ledgers.
I understand that is very soft, but I guess my question is, are ECM providers looking at BlockChain in some form as a technology they feel they will be adding to their solutions or somehow needing to integrate with in the future?
I never want to say that a particular technology can't be used, but I don't see how the characteristics of a distributed ledger really lend themselves to an ECM solution. The existing successful blockchain application - cryptocurrencies - is decentralized in order to avoid a trusted central authority, but within an organization there is a trusted central authority available - it's one of the roles played by the IT department. In that scenario there's no need to build a distributed ledger when IT can set up a SQL instance and give users INSERT rights.
And within IT, decentralization is in practice another name for clustering. I suppose it wouldn't be impossible to use a blockchain as the underlying technology for your SQL cluster or distributed filesystem, but it doesn't seem like the best tool for the job. For most applications there's going to be a better specific solution than one built out of a generic blockchain. On top of that, you would have to address the down-sides of a blockchain, like avoiding 51% attacks.
I should say that another situation where there might not be a IT department to act as the central authority is when there are several mutually distrustful organizations involved. I've heard ideas that a blockchain could be used to track property titles or freight along shipping routes. I can't think of a widespread ECM business need that follows that pattern.
I'm definitely open to suggestions, though. You might be interested in https://community.emc.com/thread/238456?start=0&tstart=0
I would like to know about this too.