Microsoft, the "biggest fan of big companies", announced the closure of blockchain services

Author | Tina

Six years after its launch, Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue its Azure Blockchain Service.

Recently, Microsoft announced that it will shut down its Azure Blockchain Service on September 10, 2021. Existing deployments will still be supported before the official shutdown. However, starting from May 10 this year, no new deployments or member creation will be supported.

Microsoft said in a support document released on May 10:

Azure Blockchain will be retired on September 10, 2021. Please evaluate your production or development status and migrate your ledger data from Azure Blockchain Service to other products.

Microsoft did not explain the reason for this decision in the document, but provided suggestions for next steps:

The first step in planning your migration is to evaluate alternative products. Please evaluate the following alternatives based on your production or development status.

Does this mean that users should investigate other alternatives in the market in the remaining four months? Fortunately, Microsoft directly recommended ConsenSys' Quorum Blockchain Service third-party service this time, because it uses the GoQuorum Ledger technology just like Azure's Blockchain. The ConsenSys website states that the Quorum Blockchain Service (QBS) service is a fully managed blockchain service that will provide Microsoft customers with a seamless migration experience.

In short, although Microsoft has not yet explained the reason for the closure of its blockchain service, we judge that it is likely due to lack of customers and Microsoft does not want to continue maintaining the old infrastructure.

Over the past 30 years, Microsoft has established a unified standard for business software models and has become one of the IT giants. Since missing the dividend period of the Internet and mobile Internet, Microsoft has been developing in a mediocre way. However, Microsoft's response to the blockchain wave in the past few years was unusually fast.

As early as 2014, Microsoft became the first international IT giant to truly deploy blockchain. In December 2014, Microsoft added Bitcoin payment options to its online stores for the first time, taking the first step into the virtual financial industry.

In November 2015, Microsoft launched and launched Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), which introduced blockchain technology into Azure and provided BaaS services to customers using Azure cloud services, allowing them to quickly create private, public or hybrid blockchain environments, solving a large number of common problems faced by early cross-industry blockchain users. Azure has therefore attracted many blockchain participants, from well-known companies to smaller startups, and its recognition is expanding.

Microsoft positions itself as a leader in the entire blockchain ecosystem, providing an environment for blockchain growth, building platforms and launching a variety of solutions. In early 2017, Microsoft released its blockchain partner strategy; in February, it joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance with representative companies from various industries around the world and made a large investment in Ethereum blockchain technology; in October, it launched the Azure Government Secret service…

Regarding the support for blockchain, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said in an interview in 2018: "Microsoft has decided to go all in on blockchain."

Marley Gray, Microsoft's then-director of financial services technology strategy, believed: "Under the surface of any industry there are idle business processes that should be significantly adjusted. Blockchain data services are a huge opportunity. We can get a lot of historical data across domains and use machine learning to analyze it." To this end, "we almost bet on the entire cloud service."

Although there have been no major updates to Microsoft Azure Blockchain Service in recent years, Microsoft previously listed General Electric (GE), JPMorgan Chase, Singapore Airlines, Starbucks and Xbox as customers on the Azure Blockchain Service product page. Driven by Microsoft, Google, IBM and Facebook have all used blockchain as a major corporate strategy.

The blue giant IBM has also invested a lot in blockchain. In December 2015, IBM and 29 other members co-founded the Hyperledger open source project, dedicated to applying blockchain solutions to various industries.

In February 2016, IBM launched the blockchain service platform BaaS. Using IBM's blockchain service on Bluemix, developers can access fully integrated development and operation tools to create, deploy, run and monitor blockchain applications on the IBM cloud. In the Hyperledger Alliance, the Fabric sub-project incubated by IBM first met the smart contract operation requirements of various commercial application scenarios.

In the past few years, IBM has vigorously promoted the Fabric project and has several well-known service scenarios: FoodTrust, a tracking system from farm to supermarket supported by Walmart, and TradeLens, a shipping container logistics blockchain supported by Maersk. In addition, IBM has added the "Trust Your Supplier" network and has previously tested the payment field through World Wire.

But in February of this year, the media broke the news that the IBM blockchain team had been cut down to only a few people. An insider said: "IBM will no longer have a real blockchain team."

According to one of the insiders, IBM has carried out a large-scale reorganization of its blockchain department, which has led to the departure of most blockchain personnel, as the blockchain technology, which IBM once praised, has only achieved 10% of its revenue target during the year under the epidemic. Insiders told the media that more than 100 blockchain-related positions were cut last year alone. At the same time, IBM's blockchain head Jerry Cuomo has been transferred and is now in charge of the AI ​​business department. In 2016, he was also the publicity officer for blockchain technology.

Another person familiar with the matter also said that IBM's blockchain division has fallen far short of its revenue targets for two consecutive years. They added that IBM had too high expectations for enterprise blockchain and that "IBM has been announcing things but not really executing on them."

An IBM spokesperson strongly denied the news. Holli Haswell, IBM's public relations director, said: "IBM's blockchain business is in good condition, thank you for your attention. We have adjusted some leaders and business units to continue to drive growth, and we do this every year." "In the future, blockchain will still be regarded as a driving force for our cloud business."

In the blockchain hype of the past few years, few companies have been able to remain calm. Many companies, led by IT giants such as Microsoft and IBM, have invested huge manpower and material resources. After Microsoft announced the closure of Azure blockchain services, we may have the opportunity to pay attention to blockchain itself again, to explore whether the technology is sound enough, and which scenarios can be truly implemented and profitable. What do you think of blockchain technology? Welcome to leave a message in the comment area!