Corda Enterprise 4.5: Accelerating Enterprise Blockchain

Enterprises and the technology firms that support them face a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Current economic conditions have provided the accelerant for digital initiatives, with a renewed focus on transparency and trust as the catalysts to transform entire industries. Business imperatives driving rapid change today will ignite a new age of progress, underpinned by technologies that can drive cross-industry collaboration and fundamentally improve how organizations transact.

In response to the need for faster business transactions, quicker time-to-value from digital initiatives and intercompany transparency, the latest releases on the Corda platform provide extensive enhancements to accelerate the performance and delivery of enterprise blockchain applications.

In the current crisis, demand for greater visibility and new ways to establish trust for example in healthcare systems, supply chains and the public sector – as well as an increasing willingness by Central Banks to explore the possibilities of a cashless future, represent just some of the emerging areas of innovation.

With these dynamics in mind, enterprise blockchain can provide a foundational platform for software firms to speed up the delivery of digital solutions to help business customers collaborate and reduce intercompany friction and inefficiencies.

High-performance blockchain

Until now the market has benchmarked blockchain performance on throughput volume or TPS (transactions per second). Corda Enterprise has proven to address these requirements, but our work with leading global financial market infrastructure providers highlighted that Corda Enterprise could also unlock the potential of an equally important aspect of performance for businesses – higher speed transactions.

To support customers and use cases where transactions need to settle instantly to overcome the risks and costs associated with long settlement timeframes (e.g. in capital markets trading), significant latency improvements in Corda Enterprise 4.5 deliver on the promise of instantaneous settlement for highly complex multi-party transactions. Through the parallelization of signature collections, faster backchain resolution and message compression, Corda Enterprise is now uniquely able to meet the demands of the world’s most demanding use cases.

Collaboration is key

Corda’s Flow Framework stands alone amongst blockchain platforms, providing an advanced inter-company workflow engine for transactions and shared business logic. And it just got better. The updated Flow Framework API adds greater sophistication to reduce the time taken to send messages and improves the performance of flows that involve multiple counterparties. Additional enhancements bring improvements to flow terminations and the monitoring of workflows.

Collaboration is also key in disaster scenarios. Corda Enterprise now comes with new operational tools to enable the collaborative recovery of missing data from peer nodes in the case of a disaster. Node operators can identify inconsistencies on the ledger and request to recover data from network peers–all while maintaining the integrity and value of the private peer-to-peer model that Corda is known for.

Faster time-to-market

As organizations and software providers place more focus on cloud deployment and containerization, this release delivers several advancements that further simplify and standardize Corda Enterprise deployment to accelerate the journey from testing to production.

Corda Enterprise images are now available on DockerHub and refreshed Azure Cloud deployment templates speed up the roll-out of Corda Enterprise development networks, nodes to an existing network, or the complete deployment of both. This will support those who want to test CorDapp designs in the cloud.

We have also added AWS CloudHSM integration to our matrix of supported HSMs to secure keys used by the node. The notary can also now store service keys in AWS CloudHSM for additional security.

Download Corda Enterprise 4.5 at https://r3.com/download-corda-enterprise

Connecting business networks

Corda Enterprise Network Manager delivers an out-of-the-box solution to setup, and operationally manage private Corda networks. The 1.3 release provides Role-based Access Control for users operating Corda networks with a new interface for user authentication and authorization. A new single Command Line Interface also streamlines network operations.

Download Corda Enterprise Network Manager 1.3 at https://r3.com/download-corda-enterprise-network-manager/

There is a window of opportunity for software providers in every industry to modernize their product offerings and deliver new solutions that meet the rapidly evolving needs of business customers.

At its core, enterprise blockchain offers a single source of truth that new applications can harness. Businesses can transact directly, reducing transaction and record-keeping costs and streamlining operations. Corda is being used by established and emerging vendors to extend the value of their solutions or deliver better ways of exchanging value across entire industry sectors.

Analyst house IDC projects corporate spending on blockchain will continue to rise to over $14bn by 2023. Software firms that can seize the opportunity now will be best placed to drive forward new collaborative solutions for customers—drastically improving how they do business today, and paving the way for long-term success in the future.

Download Corda Enterprise 4.5 at https://r3.com/download-corda-enterprise