The Hyperledger consortium has gained another valuable member in the form of Baidu, China’s search engine giant. Baidu is the leading search engine in China and handles vast resources of information as well as traffic.
The Hyperledger consortium already has marquee names like Accenture, Cisco, SAP, JPMorgan and others. Baidu would be able to add to the technical contribution of these companies in the consortium.
According to Zhang Xuyang, vice president of Baidu, the company joined the consortium in order to provide better services to its customers. The company also plans to use the blockchain technology in order to bring new solutions to their customers.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”We believe blockchain technology will allow us to better tailor our search technology to our users’ needs by enhancing the way we optimize local tastes and preferences.” – Zhang Xuyang, Vice President of Baidu[/perfectpullquote]
According to the Hyperledger consortium, the search giant’s experience in handling algorithms as well as building a huge resource of information in the Asia-Pacific region would help them deploy the technology at a faster pace throughout the region.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“It’s exciting to see a company like Baidu, which serves the world’s largest Internet user population, join Hyperledger” – Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger[/perfectpullquote]
With the increasing popularity of Hyperledger, it comes as no surprise that the search engine giant was the second new member in just a week after Tradeshift. In all, there are over 160 different companies which have joined the consortium, with more expected to join.
With the increasing popularity of blockchain, more and more companies are realizing the importance of this technology for their domain. This is what is driving the need to join enterprise blockchain consortiums like Hyperledger and its prime competitor, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA). With blockchain technology becoming one of the most important technologies to be used by the financial sector, the companies which avoid the use of this technology risk falling behind their competitors.
In the coming few months, it will be interesting to see which companies join Hyperledger versus EEA. With enterprises increasing their focus on blockchain technologies, this battle of the enterprise consortiums will be closely watched by these companies as they decide which one, if any, to join.
Tugba Kaplan - Tech Journalist
Tugba Kaplan is a journalist with more than 8 years of experience. She is an award winning correspondent. She has worked for Article 19 / The Guardian Foundation/ P24 Knowledge Right Project. She has participated in See Media Observatory in Macedonia. She was Research Fellow at Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Germany.
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