What do you get when you offer easy access to an enterprise blockchain test environment for three months?
More than 2 000 developers and tens of thousands of transaction blocks, all sprinting toward production readiness, as IBM found out.
IBM has announced that the program powering these new networks — IBM Blockchain Platform Starter Plan – is now generally available.
Starter Plan can be accessed in 10 different languages – English, German, Spanish, French, mainland Chinese, Taiwan/Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian – for users across the globe.
IBM is observing a new generation of “born on blockchain” companies emerge. The IBM Blockchain Platform Starter Plan can help these companies quickly get started as they transform the way business is done across industries.
Starter Plan can do this by helping developers, startups and enterprises build blockchain proof-of-concepts quickly and affordably with an end-to-end blockchain development experience: a secure test environment, suite of education tools and modules and one-click network provisioning. In addition, new users automatically receive a $500 credit to help start their first blockchain network when they sign up.
Powered by the open-source Hyperledger Fabric framework from The Linux Foundation, the IBM Blockchain Platform has been built specifically to help a group of institutions achieve their collective mission-critical business goals through increased transparency and reduced friction.
And, while Starter Plan was originally intended as an entry point for developers to test and deploy their first blockchain applications, users also now include larger enterprises creating full applications powered by dozens of smart contracts, eliminating many of the repetitive legacy processes that have traditionally slowed or prevented business success.
Starter Plan was introduced as a way for anyone to access the benefits of the IBM Blockchain Platform regardless of their level of blockchain understanding or production readiness.
IBM has worked for several years to commercialise blockchain and harden the technology for the enterprise based on experience with hundreds clients across industries. Beginning with IBM Research projects through to large, production networks spanning from banking and financial services to government to retail and more, IBM’s blockchain offerings have been tested and proven across a wide range of applications.
The IBM Blockchain Platform was launched in August of 2017 based on experiences running these networks for organisations across industries. IBM’s blockchain offerings are designed to help companies quickly build, test and bring networks into production.
The IBM Blockchain Platform Starter Plan offers developers, academics, startups and established enterprises access to the same experience as users in the production-ready IBM Blockchain Platform Enterprise Plan, plus tools and capabilities built specifically for those earlier in the blockchain journey:
* One-click network configuration;
* Code samples, accessible via GitHub;
* Hyperledger Fabric 1.1 and Hyperledger Composer open source technology;
* Ability to easily develop, govern and operate blockchain networks in minutes; and
* $500 in IBM Cloud credits toward building on Starter Plan.