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Microsoft's plan for enterprise-ready blockchains: In the works at Microsoft is the Coco Framework, what Redmond calls "a first-of-its kind innovation that will advance enterprise adoption of blockchain technology. (Note: Constellation believes despite the term blockchain's enduring popular usage, better ways to describe the core concept are distributed ledger technologies and synchronous ledger technologies.) Here's how Azure CTO Mark Russinovich describes the Coco Framework and its value proposition:

As enterprises look to apply blockchain technology to meet their business needs, they’ve come to realize that many existing blockchain protocols fail to meet key enterprise requirements such as performance, confidentiality, governance, and required processing power. This is because existing systems were designed to function—and to achieve consensus—in public scenarios amongst anonymous, untrusted actors with maximum transparency. Because of this, transactions are posted “in the clear” for all to see, every node in the network executes every transaction, and computationally intensive consensus algorithms must be employed. These safeguards, while necessary to ensure the integrity of public blockchain networks, require tradeoffs in terms of key enterprise requirements such as scalability and confidentiality.

Today I am proud to introduce the Coco Framework, an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements—providing a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology.

Coco achieves this by designing specifically for confidential consortiums, where nodes and actors are explicitly declared and controlled. Based on these requirements, Coco presents an alternative approach to ledger construction, giving enterprises the scalability, distributed governance and enhanced confidentiality they need without sacrificing the inherent security and immutability they expect.

The framework is not an attempt to reinvent the wheel. Rather, it relies on existing blockchain protocols, trusted execution environments (TEEs) and cryptopgraphy. In addition, Microsoft has begun integrating Coco with leading ledger technologies, including Ethereum, Quorom, Hyperledger Sawtooth and Corda, Russinovich wrote. It is also working with Intel with respect to TEEs. Microsoft started Coco with teams from Azure and its research arm, but intends to open-source the code in early 2018, hoping to scale up its development more quickly.

POV: A technical whitepaper goes into greater depth on Coco, for those in search of such information. However, the paper also gives the strong impression that Coco is more of a statement of intent or pre-announcement, rather than anything truly finalized, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland.

"Microsoft clearly feels that it must have a position and be represented in the current enthusiasm to develop blockchain, or blockchain-like, distributed ledger dolutions," Mullholland says. In addition, Azure is an ecosystem under the control of Microsoft, and as such it is possible to avoid some of the challenges of any-to-any interactions occurring between ecosystems, clouds, or products where an unknown must create a trusted relationship with another unknown. The whitepaper suggests that Azure will act as a ‘universal’ bridge between unknowns to assist in solving this problem."

While Coco may be taken as a statement of intent from Microsoft based on the strong market position of Azure, it nonethless has to be taken as a serious move that merits carefully watching as it develops, Mulholland adds.

Meanwhile, it is great to see some attention paid to blockchain user keys in TEEs, says Constellation VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson. "This is one of the missing pieces," he says. "The original anarchic blockchain lacked key management. It was everyone for themselves. The market recognized a need for 'hardware wallets' but it's still a Wild West. With Intel's involvement, I see a long overdue opportunity to standardize or at least normalize proper user key safety—in secure elements, mobile phones, smartcards or whatever form factor makes sense."

HSBC, IBM using cognitive computing to cut paperwork: IBM and large trade financing bank HSBC are working on a project meant to nearly eliminate the need for manual review huge amounts of trade finance documents. Here are the key details from their joint announcement:

HSBC’s Global Trade and Receivables Finance (GTRF) team facilitates over USD500 billion of documentary trade for customers every year, and in doing so must manually review and process up to 100 million pages of documents, ranging from invoices to packing lists and insurance certificates.

The new solution uses IBM’s advanced analytics technology, including intelligent segmentation and text analytics, to identify, digitise and extract key data within these documents before feeding it into the bank’s transaction processing systems; boosting accuracy whilst freeing up staff for more value-adding activities.

“The average trade transaction requires 65 data fields to be extracted from 15 different documents, with 40 pages to be reviewed,” said Natalie Blyth, HSBC’s Global Head of GTRF. “By digitising this process we will make transactions quicker and safer for both buyers and suppliers, leading our industry forwards, and we will reduce compliance risks through an enhanced ability to manage huge volumes of data.”

Right now, HSBC's implementation supports English-based import and export bills, with French, Spanish and Chinese support to come.

A Financial Times article notes that HSBC is also implementing blockchain in its processes. In June, it and six other banks announced participation in a trade finance platform based on the Hyperledger distributed ledger project at the Linux Foundation.

POV: HSBC's deployment is a good example of mature technology being put to effective use against the lingering challenges of paper documents in the financial sector.

Advanced optical character recognition and intelligent character recogition technologies have employed machine learning since the 1990s to learn to recognize even handwritten characters, notes Constellation VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen.

These capabilities have evolved thanks to much higher computing power, allowing even variable, non-standard documents to be processed without human intervention, Henschen says. While contracts and invoices may vary in format from among trading partners, they usually contain the same data elements and cognitive capture systems can therefore be trained to recognize and extract the right data elements, he adds. IBM's capabilities for this are rooted in its 2010 acquisition of Datacap, but it has "clearly advanced the state of the art."

Legacy watch: Aussie hospital opening allegedly delayed by stumbling EHR project: Two construction companies building a new AUS$2.3 billion hospital in Adelaide has filed a AUS$185 million lawsuit, saying that delays in completing a new EHR (electronic health records) system made it impossible to finish the job by the original deadline of April 2016, as the Adelaide Advertiser reports:

The case has been brought by two building firms that combined in a joint venture to construct the new RAH — CPB Contractors and Hansen Yuncken — against the private consortium overseeing the project, Health Minister Jack Snelling and the state of SA.

The Government plans to run the new RAH without old-fashioned patient records and instead use the computerised Enterprise Patient Administration System, which has been dogged by cost blowouts and time delays. The builders claim they were delayed because EPAS was not ready on time for installation.

“For technical completion to have been achieved under the construction contract, the state ICT was required to have been successfully installed, tested and commissioned,” the claim states.

“The state’s failure ... means that it was impossible for the builder to achieve technical completion and, as such, commercial acceptance under the construction contract.”

A mix of paper and digital records will be used when the hospital opens on September 5.

POV: The EHR industry is dominated by just a handful of players, with Epic, Cerner and MEDITECH garnering around two-thirds of the market on their own. EHR implementations can be fiendishly complicated and wildly expensive even before taking into account unexpected cost overruns. The Adelaide system is budgeted at AUS$422 million, but the U.S. Department of Defense's ongoing EHR project has had a projected $11 billion price tag.

It is also difficult to find cases of hospital staff falling in love with their EHR systems, and indeed, doctors surveyed by the Australian Medical Association about the Adelaide system called it the "worst medical software I have ever used."

It's based on a product from Allscripts, which was awarded the bid in 2010. User acceptance—as well as proper training—is key to any successful software project, and from the sound of it, health system officials have work to do.