T-Mobile a United States based wireless network operator is working hard on an enterprise Blockchain solution for months now! The big solution looks like will be proposed soon!
The Telecom giant T-Mobile has its eyes fixated on Blockchain. This was evident when recently the company was mentioned for its role in developing Hyperledger Sawtooth’s 1.0 version.
The enterprise solution using blockchain technology by T-Mobile is however under the wraps and not so widely known!
As T-Mobile works its ways with the blockchain solution, Chris Spanton, the Senior Architect of T-Mobile’s Hyper Directory which is a blockchain proof-of-concept (PoC) said to Coindesk that many milestones have been set up and are a work in progress to be achieved as of yet! The PoC work was also quietly revealed in November by the company!
The phases add up to the company’s larger aim of advancing with the open-source software!
Hyper Directory uses the Hyperledger Sawtooth technology to control who gets access to which T-Mobile cloud-based solutions. The process which is also known as Identity and Access Management (IAM)!
An event held in Las Vegas in December 17 called the Amazon’s Re:Invent saw Chris Spanton, checking on the progress of the directory! He also presented on how blockchains can improvise security and cut costs for enterprises!
In an interview to CoinDesk, Spanton said, “Creating Hyper Directory solved core IAM cases we had in our cloud infrastructure and building it as a blockchain solution provided unique opportunities to push forward our deep technical expertise.”
T-Mobile is certainly confident about the developments and is too keen about the blockchain technology and its potential!
T-Mobile’s Bigger Picture
An inch closer the publicly available information on Hyper-Directory provides an insight into the T-Mobile’s bigger picture and how it fits in there.
Spantonhas described,PoC,in his article about Hyper Directory which was his first on this topic. About PoC he says it is a reaction to “several unique pain points”. This, in turn, helps T-Mobile scale up its cloud solutions to large enterprises.
The directory has been specifically designed to address worries over access management. It helps in defining who has access to do what in the cloud, when those permissions are active, who grants those permissions access and how this is all achieved without increasing any further complexity!
His articlesaw him asking a question about, “How do we solve the ‘who is watching the watchers’ problem of auditing change management?”
Well, he answered this to be achievable via smart contracts. He described a system of smart contracts that approves and distributes accesses with the help of an API player in addition to the Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain.
The cloud permissions directory has been uniquely designed to integrate with some of T-Mobile’s other open-source software which supports the directories interoperability! Designed originally with the companies open-source jazz platform in mind, it was meant to develop cloud computing platforms without needing a centralized server in mind. This open source jazz platform was recently launched by the company.
T-Mobile has many such open source projects and hence a number of other such integrations are possible alongside Jazz! T-Mobile apparently is also working on Keybiner. The project called Keybiner is described in the Github repository as a library or collection that tokenizes a user’s authority to perform transactions.
It is yet to be defined as to how all these projects will overlap or will be placed in the future, but one thing is for sure. T-Mobile is increasing its seriousness about open-source software and is opening up more specifically to blockchain!
Competitive Edge
The increased interest of T-Mobile for Blockchain technology can be seen easily. The reason behind this increasing interest is a competitive profile that blockchain holds.
In 2017, a lot many of blockchain technological developments had been awarded patents. This was awarded to potential telecommunication companies who were competitors of T-Mobile!
A project by the Scandinavian giant telecommunications company Telenor explored with a possibility of one of its partners launching an Initial Coin Offering (ICO).
This competitive edge is fascinating more and more companies to join the blockchain sphere and T-Mobile is exactly showing same interests.
T-Mobile’s battle for market shares seems never-ending. The German telecommunications companycalled Deutsche Telekom (DT) being its majority shareholder. Building an open-source platform to grant and control permissions for any cloud-computing company would definitely give T-Mobile an upper hand in attracting business partnerships!
The wireless carrier, T-Mobile has over 69 million subscribers. It has added over 1 million subscribers per month in recent times. The company has spent over $8 billion on new wireless spectrum addition.
The Blockchain is a new avenue that T-Mobile is exploring. The company looks forward to developing game-changing solutions to advance and keep up in the blockchain world.
