Sky Republic, an enterprise blockchain company founded by B2B software veterans, has launched its Smart Contract Platform built to synchronize B2B ecosystems. With Atlas, each smart contract is powered by a dedicated, permissioned and event driven blockchain that guarantees performance, confidentiality and enforceability.
Atlas consensus technology uses a unique virtual machine and proven cryptography that allows each smart contract to be notarized safely by one of the parties involved or one or multiple third parties like a blockchain consortium. Business events and records are pushed in real time through network choreographies to the appropriate recipients. Recipients can verify them on the fly through their local copy of a smart contract so they don’t have to blindly trust smart contract notaries as they would in leading enterprise Blockchains.
According to Forrester, more than 20 billion one-to-one EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) transactions take place annually. However, EDI standards were designed before the rise of the internet and power many industries including supply chain, transportation, healthcare and finance. These antiquated standards fail to synchronize B2B ecosystems end-to-end which leads to lack of visibility, mitigation disputes and ultimately a loss of money.
“Most enterprises today basically operate with the equivalent of one-to-one text messaging when they could obviously benefit more from a secure form of multimedia group messaging,” said Chris Fabre, founder and CEO of Sky Republic who spent 10 years as CEO of the middleware company Axway. “We’ve spent three years investing in research and development for Atlas. Companies need to reduce friction and gain more visibility into their supply chain to mitigate the impact of disruptions. Each year, these disruptions generate over $100B in losses impacting more than 70% of companies. We know without a doubt that blockchain is emerging as the clear answer to go beyond EDI and improving B2B ecosystems.”
While blockchain has traditionally been associated with Bitcoin and Ethereum, which transact digital cash, it has many additional applications for enterprises. For example, R3 Corda accelerates financial workflows and Hyperledger Fabric enables document database sharing. Atlas blockchain was created to truly synchronize B2B ecosystems by orchestrating and simplifying multi enterprise processes, creating consensus on all relevant records (e.g. documents, IoT feeds, or EDI messages) and to fit with existing IT, business and governance models. Research firm IDC’s forecast on blockchain spending suggests at least a $1 billion software market by 2022 for currently identified use cases, and new applications within B2B ecosystems represent a significant opportunity to match this number on its own.
To implement its vision in air transportation, Sky Republic has collaborated with SITA, a leader in IT and communications technologies in the industry, since 2018. The partnership aims at creating solutions for air cargo, aircraft maintenance and passenger bag domains. SITA blockchain, powered by Sky Republic’s Atlas platform, won an innovation award at the IATA 2019 World Cargo Symposium for a solution managing the chain of custody of aircraft containers.
“We are thrilled with our partnership with Sky Republic and are working together to build multiple solutions powered by Atlas for the Air Transportation industry,” said Arnaud Brolly, head of product innovation portfolio at SITA. “Atlas benefited from Sky Republic’s unique expertise in blockchain, middleware and B2B solutions and is the perfect platform to better synchronize supply chains.”
Focused on air transportation and supply chain industries, Sky Republic is also working on solutions for enterprise customers in healthcare and finance. Atlas can be used on premise, private or public cloud to replace or augment existing infrastructures and power new ones.
