Blockchain Leader Kaleido Announces New Support for Microsoft Azure; Unveils Ability to Build Borderless Blockchains Across Clouds and Geographies

To address the needs of enterprise blockchain organizations, Kaleido's Blockchain Business Cloud delivers another industry first, enabling clients to build networks across multiple clouds and geographies on a single platform.

AUSTIN, Texas, March 14, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SXSW Conference 2019 -- Kaleido, a ConsenSys business, announces its Blockchain Business Cloud is now available on Microsoft Azure's Marketplace.This new support for Azure, in tandem with Kaleido's earlier collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), allows Kaleido to offer an industry first: a seamless blockchain solution spanning multiple cloud providers and geographic regions. Decentralized ownership of the network across clouds and regions is a foundational enterprise blockchain requirement and Kaleido's new borderless blockchain capability uniquely fills this need, enabling an accelerated pace of adoption by global blockchain consortia.

Blockchain technology is sweeping across enterprises in all major industries. With its shared ledger and smart contract software, blockchain requires business network participants to collaborate in order to deploy and operate the technology. This collaboration can often take the form of blockchain consortia: groups of organizations that collaborate to define use cases and to develop and run blockchain applications for shared business utility. In fact, according to a recent study by Deloitte, 74% of respondents said their company was either already participating in a blockchain consortium or likely to join one.

Yet organizations to date have struggled to progress blockchain projects in part because each enterprise brings its own pre-existing investments in cloud, IT structures, operating preferences and data residency requirements. Participants starting with different entry points could find themselves siloed in one cloud when they want to graduate out of limited size pilots into large scale hybrid business networks where they can realize the full value of blockchain ecosystem initiatives.

According to industry analysts, AWS and Azure comprise over 80 percent of the public cloud sector. For the first time, the enterprises they serve around the globe can now collaborate to build diverse business networks on a single, cross cloud solution operating on the Kaleido platform.

"Blockchain with its shared ledger is fundamentally a distributed technology. The world's transactional systems are being reinvented on blockchain and need an enterprise platform that also is broadly distributed," said Steve Cerveny, Kaleido Founder and CEO. "We've built our platform across the leading public clouds including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to give our clients the ability to create global, cross-cloud networks. Our customers' digital ecosystems can now grow and scale wherever and however the participants require."

Kaleido's Blockchain Business Cloud platform enables enterprises to accelerate from the proof-of-concept stage to production blockchain networks for diverse ecosystems. Since its launch in May 2018, Kaleido has helped enterprises deploy overa thousand consortia blockchain networks, producing over 150 million blocks, with some of the world's most recognizable brands, like T-Mobile, Kroger, Heineken, Sony, Fox, UnionBank, and many others, participating in live networks.

"Microsoft continues to work deeply with the Ethereum community to advance applications of enterprise blockchain," said Yorke Rhodes, principal program manager, Blockchain Engineering at Microsoft. "We're happy to welcome Kaleido to our rich blockchain partner ecosystem, so enterprises can realize the business value of blockchain faster."

DrumG, an emerging global financial technologies company, is using Kaleido's Blockchain Business Cloud on Microsoft Azure to power its Titanium Network, a decentralized, anonymous and cryptographically secured over-the-counter (OTC) consensus data solution for investment bank trading and valuation operations, which includes Credit Suisse as a network founding institution.

"Having access to Kaleido on Azure allows us to build on the leading enterprise blockchain solution in the market, while maximizing the leading cloud infrastructure investments we've already made," says Tim Grant, Founder and CEO of DrumG. "Kaleido also lets us build and deploy our blockchain solution so that it is integrated directly with our existing business processes and apps already running on Microsoft Azure."

Kaleido customer komgo is a blockchain-based commodity trade and finance group comprised of global institutions like Citi, ING, Koch Supply & Trading, MUFG Bank, Societe Generale, ABN AMRO Bank, Credit Agricole Group, BNP Paribas, Shell and others, who each have varying needs and preferences when it comes to deployment. If one member wants to run on Azure, and another wants to run on AWS, they can seamlessly work together in a single blockchain network on Kaleido.

"As networks onboard new members and scale, these sorts of capabilities from Kaleido are critical to remove friction and tear down barriers to adoption so organizations can accelerate their path to building live production solutions for diverse business cases," said Souleïma Baddi, CEO of komgo.

The Kaleido Marketplace of plug-and-play services, integrations and partner software such as HD wallets for privacy and ID registries for organizational identity, as well as industry products such as Chainlink for smart contract oracles, Viant for supply chain management, OpenLaw and Clause.io for real-time legal contracts, are all now available on Microsoft Azure.

Kaleido on Microsoft Azure is available today, try it for free at kaleido.io.

About Kaleido:

Kaleido, a ConsenSys Enterprise Business, is dedicated to making blockchain radically simple for organizations to adopt so that our societies will fully benefit from decentralized models and new trust systems. Kaleido is collaborating with cloud leaders Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to offer its Blockchain Business Cloud, a full-stack SaaS platform and dedicated blockchain marketplace to accelerate the entire enterprise journey from exploration, proof of concepts and pilots to live production business networks. For more information, visit www.Kaleido.io.

About ConsenSys:

ConsenSys is focused on driving digital architectures toward a more open, inclusive, and secure internet of value, commonly called Web3. With a more trustworthy internet architecture, we are helping enterprises and governments unlock new business models and value, gain efficiencies through a shared IT infrastructure, and utilize modern cryptographic methods to safeguard private user data. We accomplish this through our unique global business developing Ethereum blockchain, comprised of a startup incubator, Enterprise Ethereum consulting arm, and investment fund.