EDI and Blockchain - A match made in heaven?

Blockchain technology has quickly become a major Buzzword, spurred on by the recent media attention on Cryptocurrencies. In fact, blockchain technology has been around since the early 1990’s, originally proposed as a way for preventing online documents from being tampered with, but only with the advent of Bitcoins did it reach the hype that it has today.

I am often asked if Integration Wizards works with blockchain technology, since we specialize in data integration and electronic transactions. It is a valid question and no doubt would blockchain technology offer significant improvements to electronic B2B transactions, some of which I will discuss in this article.

However, I do not believe it will happen overnight, because EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) technology is a slow-moving ship and there are no benefits for a single company in a partner network to change, unless other trading partners also follows. This was one of the main reason XML (eXtensible Markup Language) never really took off, although it was (and still is) a far superior format for electronic business transactions than the clunky 30 year old flatfile formats used by traditional EDI standards, such as EDIFACT and ANSI X12.

Link to the complete article:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/edi-blockchain-match-made-heaven-mathias-...

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