Starting Up Enterprise Blockchain For Business With IBM Blockchain’s Jerry Cuomo

NTE 60 | Enterprise Blockchain

Blockchain is a system in which record transactions are being handled and maintained across several computers that are linked in a peer-to-peer network. In this day and age in the business world, blockchain has become a helpful system that is already transforming enterprise business model and promoting growth. In this episode, host Tracy Hazzard interviews IBM Blockchain’s Jerry Cuomo about the blockchain technology and how it is starting to become more trusted and applied in large businesses. Listen to this podcast episode to know more about blockchain and, specifically, enterprise blockchain technology.

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Starting Up Enterprise Blockchain For Business With IBM Blockchain’s Jerry Cuomo

I have Jerry Cuomo on. He is the Vice President of Blockchain Technologies with IBM. He’s leading the definition of IBM Blockchain strategy offerings and customer engagement methodology. He holds the title of IBM fellow and he’s one of the founding fathers of IBM WebSphere Software. At IBM, he has led projects in the areas of API economy, mobile computing, cloud computing, web application servers, Java, TCP/IP, real-time collaboration software and high-performance transactional systems. He has filed for over 50 US patents for IBM and he continues to be a visible spokesperson for IBM in emerging business and technologies areas.

He also has a new book Blockchain for Business, which I really wished I had had time to read before our interview, but I was so glad to get him on the show, so I took the first opportunity. He lays out the secret sauce that makes enterprise blockchain’s projects successful. More than that, he has identified three of the core pillars to achieve success to power the future of business. The reason I am so interested in talking with Jerry is because of that intersection between when enterprise blockchain might be right for you and when it’s more of a public blockchain. Thinking about that process us business owners muddled. We don’t know how to think that through. Now we’re going to talk with an expert that’s working it and powering the future. The other part about it is that when a company like IBM dives so deep into something like blockchain, we start to see that it is truly going to become the new infrastructure and that excites me as well. I’m excited to bring you Jerry Cuomo.

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Jerry, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

I’m excited to talk big business blockchain. Blockchain for Business is the name of your book.

It is, yes, Blockchain for Business. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate. Blockchain and business go really well together.

In what way? Let’s talk about that because I think so too, but I’m curious as to your viewpoint and what’s going on over at IBM that you guys think that it’s worth it?

It’s worth it from the sense of something we’ve probably all learned in grade school, which is a group working together will almost always produce a better outcome than any single member of that group working by themselves. It’s also known as teamwork. It’s the long definition of teamwork. The problem is that no business works in isolation, but they are responsible for their actions. Whether they’re collaborating as a team, they can only go so far. They are regulatorily responsible in many cases. Blockchain is a way for them really to get the power of the group going. We’re bringing the element of trust that is missing. That now breaks open the ability to work together as a team and do it in a way that is completely trustworthy and that regulators will accept. It’s reducing great amounts of friction and introducing possibilities to optimize business processes that have been around for generations. I’d love to give some examples, but I think that’s the general why they go so well together. It enables a level of teamwork that was not possible before.

Before we dive into the examples, you hit all three of my top questions here. I’m very curious, here in the show, to talk about trust issues. Let’s start there. You also touched on frictionless and optimization, which is in some ways a return on investment conversation. We’ll touch on that as well but let’s start with the trust issues. Were you seeing a lot of business trust issues going on that seemed like there was an opportunity to create a more trustworthy environment?

Absolutely. It’s not like, “I don’t trust you because you’re bad.” It’s, “I can’t trust you because I have to report my own results and I’m responsible for those results.” If I am accepting a new customer into my bank, I have to vet that customer. If you and I are collaborating and I let a bad actor into our collaboration, you’re responsible for that too.

You’re talking about some of the things that we’re going to touch on when we talk about frictionless is supply chain management. My background is in product design and development and that’s what I write for Inc. Magazine. When we look at all the products that we’ve developed over time, it’s, “I’m the designer so it’s on me if I pick a bad factory.” If the factory fails to perform, it’s on the brand or the retailer and it’s a cascading effect of small decisions that are made all along the way. No one really knows enough about each other because you’re trying something new. You’re creating a new innovative product.

Almost all of our systems are centralized because they have to be. It’s about I can only trust myself because we report, we are an institution. We’re responsible for the things we do. How is it possible that I can literally share the same IT system with another company and still trust it? The nice part about and the breakthrough part about blockchain is we take trust from an interpersonal thing. We make it into an algorithmic thing that’s bounded by cryptography. It’s not a matter of whether I trust you or not. I know you can be trusted because the information is on an encrypted ledger that is tamper-resistant that we both vetted together.

NTE 60 | Enterprise Blockchain — Blockchain for Business

Unlike traditional technology that we might share in a B2B system where there is a database, a database typically has a single administrator and that single administrator has the power to change records in the database. While you might trust the CEO of that company that this administrator works for because they have a great reputation, do you really trust that database administrator? In a blockchain, there’s not one database administrator, there’s an administrator for every participant in the blockchain. They each participate in the process of consensus. They work together to derive a common answer. When the answer is derived, it is appended to the blockchain in a way that can’t be changed by any of the administrators.

When we start thinking about this from a food flow, because I know that you guys have a lot to do with the food processing and the flow of it. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be failures and that there won’t be things that go wrong. It means that when you hit that point, everybody knows, “There really was something wrong and here’s where it is.”

That’s right. That’s a shared ledger. It does two things. One is it gives us visibility. It’s not just the visibility of things that I can see, it’s the combined visibility of what I can see, what you can see, then what the next member can see and the next member and so on and so on. That’s why when Walmart did their food trace, they did a test and they took a package of sliced mangoes from a store shelf and they said, “How long will it take us to trace back?” They were able to trace back the mango farm in a week, in about seven days.

A week, which is really bad if you’re dealing with a disease, right?

Yeah. People are getting sick or dying or all the mangoes are being eradicated and that’s a lot of waste. That’s what they did before the Food Trust network. Now with a shared ledger where everyone could see everyone’s data trail, in 2.2 seconds, you can try to trace it right back. That is transformative being able to do that.

It’s transformative for the consumer as well. It means that if I pick up the bad mangoes in the produce department, by the time I check out, if they’re recalled it, they won’t sell it to me. That’s a huge amount of trust built.

There is a company that we’re working with in France, Carrefour and they have a QR code. I saw it on a box of dried potatoes and you can take your phone and scan the QR code and it shows you the provenance, how the potatoes got to that box and all of the steps in between. It may be too much information.

I’m afraid my girls might not eat some food if they saw where they really came from.

That’s what I mean by accountability. In a world where there’s that level of accountability, the world would be a better place. You touched upon something that’s also important. It’s not the ability to track and trace. When everything goes well, being able to track and trace is one thing but where blockchain comes into play was when things don’t go well and when there’s a process exception or a dispute. Blockchain is not going to eliminate the dispute, but what it will do is expedite the time it takes to pinpoint, when the last time you agreed and then when did the dispute started happening. We saw in one use case where we were looking at a lending system, where you were borrowing money to buy some goods and then we were shipping goods and there were multiple players involved in that transaction: a buyer, a supplier and a procurement or distribution channel in that. When you think about it, if everything is working fine, there’s no issue. If something goes wrong, even with a three-party transaction, you have to reconcile.

I have my view of the truth. The other two parties have a view of their truth and what do we do in this digital world? We get on the phone and we start talking about what it was. In our study, it can take up to 44 days to resolve a dispute of that nature. With blockchain, we see disputes resolved in under ten days. What’s happening in that supply chain while that dispute is in question is you’re not getting paid. Things are frozen, commerce is frozen. It’s not the fact that it’s happening under ten days. It’s that the world is now progressing again and that is transformative. That business transformation is very difficult to impossible to do without blockchain. It’s pretty cool.

How I got interested in blockchain was actually an interview with Steve Wozniak. I was lucky enough to get to interview him at an event and as a creator and an inventor myself, his excitement about blockchain interests me so much. I was at a conference. I was there and I was a bit of a skeptic because when you’re tying blockchain and cryptocurrency together, there’s a lot of skepticism in that. What impressed me the most was his idea of the creative value being maintained through the process. It’s part of the reason why my business was so hard over the years. As a designer, I would receive a royalty on products. Getting an audit, being able to see, did you really ship as much as you paid me for it? There are two elements in the process that fight against that transparency that’s required to trust that you’re getting paid for your value. One side is the side of people don’t want to show their company sales and all of those things, but I need to trust that it’s there.

Tracy, you’re right. Blockchain is bringing the missing element of trust to our digital world. Think about what the world will be as blockchain continues to be adopted. Think about AI, what’s the intersection of AI and blockchain. You go to your doctor and maybe like me, I’ll go in and get a checkup. I picked my doctor because my doctor is a geek like me and likes technology and has an AI bot that isn’t a doctor’s assistant. The assistant quickly after ingesting my data says, “Risk for hypertension, start on this pharma X company hypertension medicine.” I do that. I go back a couple of weeks later, I sprained my ankle. “Based on your health history, this anti-inflammatory medicine from pharma X would be perfect for you.”

I’m sitting there saying, “Who created that neural network? Who created that AI model? Where did the data come from that trained that bot? Why should I trust this bot or my doctor? Did pharma X have anything to do with it?” “Maybe.” The consumer should know and if the consumer had that blind faith, it’s not that the doctor or the producer of the bot trust them. It shouldn’t be trust. We shouldn’t have to trust them. It’s, “Show me the forensic report that says the model was diversely trained,” and that’s it. I can prove that that data fit the criteria that it is provable. It is not just, “Trust me, I’m good. I went to good schools.” It’s not about trust that way. It’s about, “Show me the forensics,” and once you showed me that, it’s not about trust. I don’t have to trust you that way.

I don’t have to reveal my secret sauce in the process. Speaking of Wozniak, he was in the news because he and his wife about the Apple credit card having the disparity. That’s what they’re talking about. They’re talking about there may be a disparity, there may be a bunch of criteria I don’t know about, but go ahead and show me and prove to me that there is trust that the data is not gender-unequal, that there’s not a disparity there. I want to know that, I want to believe that. What I know about AI, because I write about it pretty frequently, is that there is a great gender and cultural disparity because the data itself is flawed, to begin with. I know this from personal experience in the product design world. When we designed based on past sales, we don’t get great future innovation. There has to be something in play that is human.

When you think about excellent design, if we can bring a design that elevates trust and confidence in business-to-business processes, consumer products, that’s the next bump in adoption because it’s the bane of existence of the digital world, “Is my data leaking? Is my privacy being compromised in some way?” Imagine if we could do something about that. What I’m saying is you don’t have to imagine, the thing is here and it’s the enterprise blockchain. It not only has the generic name, an enterprise blockchain or blockchain for business, it has a physical name. What we’re doing in Hyperledger with the technology, this enterprise blockchain is embodied in Hyperledger fabric, which is the first enterprise-permissioned blockchain. It’s not the only one right now, but it was the first one. It’s been around now. It’s getting into release too. It has thousands of networks on it across IBM and all of the commercial users of Hyperledger fabric: Amazon, Oracle and Huawei. Many others are using this technology in their commercial offerings.

We have about 1,100 networks running on IBM blockchain. About 90% of them are developer sandboxes, but that implies over a hundred of them are doing real production things with blockchain. This thing that we call enterprise blockchain has a name and has a product. The technology is actually pretty interesting in the sense that with commercial diversity, you can get it from IBM. You can get it from Amazon. It really is inviting folks to jump in with both feet because the fear of getting locked in or coming into early is alleviated a bit there.

You’re bringing up a good point because a lot of people do think that it is too soon, that there aren’t a lot of real applications to it yet. It’s expensive, is another perception out there. I own and operate a podcast business. We’ve been looking at building our whole data serving and everything on the blockchain because of advertising models that we’d like to employ in the future where there’s zero trust in advertising. Are your numbers really what they are? Are they converting? Is this real? I love the idea of that.

Is that an authentic podcast or is it a knock off from someone else? I do think to have that in the news is a very prudent use case of blockchain. In the last couple of years that we’ve been heads down on blockchain, when I pick my head up, I see some wonderful things. I was naive to so many facets of different industries as I hold my iPhone in my hand and I look at my screen time, I’m like, “That can’t really be my screen time. There must be a bug in this program.” In this digital world, how many things are still not digital? In our day-to-day consumer world, I’m asking Alexa for this and that. When you look at certain processes like global shipping and freight containers that get shipped, we have our trade lens network that we’ve helped co-create with the likes of Maersk. Freight shipping has been going on since 14 Columbus. It’s amazing, how so many processes are paper-based.

There's no 'this is the right way to do blockchain.' Blockchains have features that transcend the cryptocurrency. Click To Tweet

With blockchain, we’re seeing that the digitization world, the digital transformation is actually hitting that. There are many other facets of the business. For example, roaming data charges, we’re working with a client that is convening a network to help settle the micropayments that occur. When you’re on a trip to Thailand and you stop off in Singapore perhaps and your phone is on, I’m on my corporate plan and I charge a few minutes here to a few minutes there. How does your provider true-up? Is it even worth it for them to pursue these payments or is it the cost? I probably have to hire an intermediary to go track down those costs.

In the product business, we have the same problem with sales on Amazon selling. If you’re selling on Amazon, you’ve got all these sales tax all over the place and you’re supposed to keep up on this. You’re basically doing $100,000, $200,000 a year in sales, you cannot keep up with that. You don’t have the staff for that.

People in 2016, 2017 was in search of what is that enterprise blockchain use case. It’s funny because the use cases started coming out of the corners and biting people and say, “Here I am.” It’s the problem that you’ve been struggling with. What it took is a couple of years for connoisseurs. A blockchain connoisseur is a person who lives in an industry and experiences the toils, the everyday trouble. When they discover blockchain, it takes maybe a year or so for them to sink in. They become the connoisseur. They say, “I’ve been struggling with this problem and there’s the answer.” We’ve been trying to be the matchmakers, like the eharmony of bringing, finding those industry-aware folks and introducing blockchain, the art of what it can do. We talked about supply chain five times already, but if you squint your eye and tilt your head and look across different industries, whether it’s drug manufacturing and counterfeiting, it’s a big deal.

It’s a big deal as we’re seeing with all the vaping going on right now.

How do you know the provenance of that drug? Where did it come from? Is it certified? Is the certification valid? That’s a supply chain. When you look at the tracking, the tracing, the provenance, the exception handling, the dispute management and all of those things we’ve talked about, it’s everywhere. That’s why I do think enterprise blockchain has certainly picked up steam in 2019, finding its spot against these practical applications. Tracy, the best part is when it hits everyday life, as some of the topics you’re talking about. Being a technologist for a couple of generations, many of the technologies live in data centers and in clouds and never see the light of day. Some of the projects that we’ve worked on like food safety network, Food Trust, are changing everyday life for the better for people like you and me. I’ve cited them many times, but they’re continuing to grow the network not only in Canada but now South of the border in the US is a company called SecureKey who are giving people in Canada back the birthright of their data is their data. It’s with a system called Verified.Me.

Imagine, what iTunes did for the personal recording artist, which is I can put out a song and do digital rights management and I can actually set out the rules by which, the price by which, the terms by which, and the number of copies that can be sold of this piece of digital media. Imagine doing that with your own personal data. When you go rent an apartment and they say, “Give us the following one million pieces of information about you, your grandmother or your mother’s maiden name. Where do you work? Where do you have your bank?” As the owner of that data with Verified.Me, you can license the apartment office to ask questions to your bank and to your DMV. You can license the DMV and the bank to respond to those questions. You can say, “You’re allowed to respond to this question coming from this.” The interesting thing is that the apartment office with Verified.Me will know the information is coming from a valid provenance from a DMV perspective, a valid bank, but they won’t know exactly where you used to live or what bank you bank with. They just know it’s trusted and similarly the bank won’t know where you’re renting your apartment.

I went and opened another second bank account at my same bank that I bank at. It was like adding business savings to our account and we had to go through and bring all our paperwork, our entire articles of incorporation and all this stuff. I was like, “You’ve already seen all that because we’ve had an account with you for five years.” They were like, “I’m sorry. This is the process.” I was like, “This seems all wrong. This should be so much less friction to be able to do this and it should take five minutes, not 50 minutes,” which is how long it took.

If you look at what SecureKey has done and you expand it out to different industries, to different regions of the world, there is a time where identity thefts’ days may be numbered if you expand that out. This is not a small talk. The examples are happening and these are interesting technologies. As a technologist, I get very excited about things almost like technological magic, technologies that are associated and affiliated with blockchain called zero-knowledge proof, which is the miracle drug for preserving personal information. Imagine going into a bar and with a twenty-something-year-old daughter. As a dad, these things are on my mind. My daughter going into a bar and being asked, “Show me your government-issued ID.” All government-issued IDs have not just your age on it. There’s literally your address, what color are your eyes or your blood donor, all of that additional information like your birthday.

Your full birth date on there is scary for some.

I don’t want that bouncer getting my daughter’s address unless she wants to give it to the person. With zero-knowledge proof, if you can imagine a bar that was hooked into an identity system, your government-issued document would be on your cell phone, it would be encrypted. It would be able to levy or exercise an assertion against it, “Are you over 21,” and without decrypting the document. This is the part that sounds like technological magic. It can come back with an answer, yes or no. In that world, you have not revealed anything, only the absolute piece of information that was required. You didn’t leave any cookie crumbs behind. There was no camera behind you knew that was taking a picture as you showed them your driver’s license.

Now, you’re really scaring me. There’s stuff like that though.

I don’t want to be paranoid about these things. I’m want to be excited that this is not coming. Tracy, it’s here. The people are doing it and it’s good for all of us. This enterprise blockchain thing is not only something that is technologically interesting. It very well may change everyday life for the better.

I love your excitement about this, Jerry, but there’s a little question in the back of some people’s minds, especially because the blockchain and cryptocurrency community are a lot independent. How are we going to trust people? How are we going to trust IBM with building this? The enterprise blockchain itself is criticized within the community. I don’t know that I’m a personal critic of it that way, but I just pointed it out so that we can talk about that.

I would love to break it down. The importance of trust in an enterprise blockchain starts with the code. You’ve got to trust the code. What’s the provenance, the pedigree of the code? That’s why blockchain must be done with an open-source, with true open governance, transparent visibility with diverse participants with many eyes on the technology really vetting it 24×7. That’s why one of the first things we did back in 2015, 2016 is to help co-create the Hyperledger project under The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation is the gold standard for open source. The code is there whether you’re a government, a business or an individual. You can go out and see the code that is running underneath the blockchain.

I want to stop you there for a little bit of education for the audience. Thinking about this from this standpoint, from a layman’s terms or lay woman’s terms in my case here, the reality is that so often we get an algorithm or a code that is put in place somewhere that is built to prove something that you already know to be true. You’re not truly testing the data to be wrong and right at the same time. That’s where open source comes in a different way because everybody’s job is to say, “Is this code sound?”

By the way, it can get very annoying with so many people in your business looking at it.

Open source isn’t always fun, that’s for sure.

There’s no privacy. You’re sitting there putting code out there. It produces very good code. You’re on your best behavior because everyone’s watching and that’s one thing. It’s making sure that the code is open-source. The other thing is that there is no universal right or wrong for blockchain in my opinion. There’s no, “This is the right way to do blockchain. That’s the wrong way.” Blockchains have features that transcend the cryptocurrency, blockchain and then enterprise blockchain. There are many common features. I’ll spare you of my bird and duck analogies that I do to show that these things are in the same genus or families and stuff like that. I have a whole bid on that.

Sometimes you don’t need one and that’s the difference. It needs to be based on what your needs are and how you need to build it.

It’s based on what you need and it comes with trust. How is trust built in these different blockchains? In Bitcoin and Ethereum, it’s quite clever. They build trust in their system while allowing the participants to remain anonymous and it’s pretty interesting. I equated it to the algorithm. It’s the algorithm of the fraternity hazing process. The way it works is in a fraternity, you don’t know the person. They’re coming in and they’re pledging. What do you do? You make them do crazy things and if they do them, then you say, “They’re really determined to be part of this. Let me trust them.” It’s a form of building trust. If they keep doing these things, they must want to be here. I’ll let them be here.

In these crypto networks, proof of work is like that. You participate in anonymously solving cryptographic puzzles that are associated with proving the ledger. That’s going to cost you to do that as an anonymous participant. You’re going to be burning energy and compute to do that. If you do that consistently enough, the network will trust you and let you in. That’s important because in those networks, they’re trying to preserve the properties of money. It’s a bearer instrument. If you drop a dollar, someone else picks it up and it’s their dollar. They cleverly do that. In business, anonymity is not going to fly. You need to be known to the network.

In enterprise blockchains, we gain trust in a network and the members are known. We accept that at the top of the network, there is a process by which members are vetted, given membership cards and let into the network. The question is, “How many members do you need for the network to be trustworthy?” One is probably too little. One is centralized. Two is better than one but if they both vote, one vote yes and one vote no, you can’t reach consensus. Three is the right one because now you’ll be able to achieve consensus. You need at least three in your network. If one fails, then you’re back to two. Maybe 4 or 5 is the right number. When you think about that, it’s like the checks and balances in governments.

There are three branches of the US government. It’s because of checks and balances. In an enterprise network, members are known. You don’t need everyone in the ecosystem to be running the blockchain network. In the US, if there is a potential person who is accused of a crime, we don’t have everyone with a mobile app in the state of New York voting whether they’re guilty or not. We delegate our trust to a jury of twelve. They work on behalf of that. Enterprise blockchains could work that way too. You don’t need everyone in the ecosystem to be running the blockchain. You just need enough diversity in that pool to meet the basic criteria. It probably has to be more than 4 or 5, but it has to be enough so that the users of that network believe that there is balance and there’s diversity and that no one member could take complete control. When people criticize enterprise blockchain and say, “This is not a real blockchain,” I say, “That’s crazy. No, it is a real blockchain. It’s just different.”

People especially business owners are very intrigued by that. When I talk about it, when I write articles about it, that’s the information I get back. They’re very intrigued by this. They can start to see the value. They see opportunities where it could be a play, but as a business owner and as a product developer, whatever that might be, we don’t see how we can get started. That still seems very mysterious to us. What do you recommend and what’s the best approach in it? Does IBM have some educational process for us?

Blockchain is here to stay and it's here to do good for all of us. Click To Tweet

Absolutely. I’m going to talk about going out to IBM.com/blockchain and checking out our free developer sandbox. It’s VS Code-based, which is a very popular set of tools for developers. You can experiment with writing your first smart contract or you can take one of the sample smart contracts and test it out to see how it works. Ultimately, the magic is a business-aware person and a technology aware person meet and the sparks fly. That’s when it’s like, “I have this problem and now you’re telling me we can bring a group together to solve this problem together. How would that work?” That’s on the technical side. On the business side, on IBM.com/blockchain, you will see many use cases and examples. Why reinvent the wheel? I particularly say read the supply chain-oriented examples because supply chains touch every industry.

They were interesting that’s why my questions were formed the way they were.

Look at those use cases. That’s going to inspire you on what problems blockchain could solve in your world. With that, the Blockchain Garage, the IBM Cloud Garage is a great place to go and co-create an idea. Make one of those ideas come to life. Tracy has had some interesting times in the Garage because many of the world’s IT systems are done through consulting mano a mano, IBM to one customer at a time. The cool part about blockchain now is in the Garage, we’re bringing groups in. Imagine four competing insurance companies are sitting in a room together. On the first day, there are cold stares. No one wants to talk. By day two, the ideas are flying because they realize that while they do compete, if my insurance company was filing claims together, we do a lot of redundant work against that claim and it’s not the redundant work could be done better, it has to be done. You need to find someone to give an estimate. Let’s go and let’s co-create that insurance claim and usually the sparks start flying initially on cost savings. Read about some of those use cases as a business leader and you’ll see that then get your technology team. We’ll be glad at IBM to help bring you together as well as some of your partners.

It’s like a playground too. Everyone’s learning off of each other to improve and grow.

There’s also a book that talks about these things too.

Are you referring to Blockchain for Business?

Yes. It really reflects on the examples that we’ve seen over the past few years and then extracting some of the lessons we’ve learned from those examples where I try to distill it down.

Jerry, I am so glad that we’ve managed to make this happen so that we could talk with each other because your passion for this and your excitement for the future, I’m energized. I’ve had this little spark in it, but you’re making it feel more real to me. That’s always a great place. When I really feel my business, this is not a pipe dream. It’s not way out there in the future. This is right now, could be within the next year that I have that built into my business. That changes the game for me.

I say blockchain is here for good and I need it as a double meaning. It’s here to stay and it’s here to do good for all of us. Thanks for the opportunity.

My mind is spinning with all the ideas and I want to get my IT team over to check all of this out. It came up in the business and I know readers have been following along with the fact that I have this podcast production business and I’ve been thinking about how I’m incorporating blockchain in to create a better trust model on the advertising side of the business. I was talking with my tech team and we are looking at a new model and we’re talking about the strategy. It came up that we have to do a whole complete rebuild of our database and all systems that we’re working with. It might be the right opportunity to be doing this. I’m excited to go back to my team as we strategize at the end of the year for what’s going to happen for us in 2020 and have them take a look at what can happen.

I’m so glad I was able to have Jerry Cuomo and bring you some of the viewpoints of what’s going on blockchain for business. I’m always searching for new information, especially real-world application of what’s going on, really seeing that intersection between business and blockchain. If you have anyone you’d like to suggest to the show, you know how to reach us at NewTrustEconomy.com. You can also find us on social media @NewTrustEconomy. Thank you for reading. I’m Tracy Hazzard and I’ll be back next time with another great episode.

Important Links

About Jerry Cuomo

Gennaro “Jerry” Cuomo is currently the Vice President of Blockchain Technologies, leading the definition of IBM Blockchain strategy, offerings and customer engagement methodology. Holding the title of IBM Fellow, he is one of the founding fathers of IBM WebSphere Software. At IBM, Cuomo has led projects in the areas of API Economy, Mobile computing, Cloud computing, Web Application Servers, Java, TCP/IP, real-time collaboration software, and high-performance transactional systems. Cuomo currently has filed for over 50 US patents for IBM. Jerry continues to be a visible spokesperson for IBM in emerging business and technology areas.

In his new book Blockchain for Business, Jerry lays out the secret sauce that makes enterprise blockchain projects successful. But more than that, he has identified three of the core pillars to achieve success to power the future of business.

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