- According to Software AG, the technical maturity of the IOTA Tangle for integration into productive solutions is significantly more advanced than competing blockchain solutions.
- Blockchains and DLTs will be ready for production in 3-8 years, according to the report.
Software AG, whose Vice President for Innovation & Architecture, Christoph F. Strnadl, is also on the steering committee of Tangle EE, yesterday published the “SAG Tech Radar”, which highlights the relevance of approximately 25 technologies in the field of Internet of Things (IoT). As the report states, Software AG’s CTO office continuously evaluates new trends and technologies.
Software AG’s Technology Radar for IoT and Integration has published a shortened version of the results and evaluates technologies such as 5G, Gaia-X, Big Data, GraphQL, Augmented Reality, SPIFFE/SPIRE as well as the blockchain/ distributed ledger technology according to their degree of adoption readiness. According to the scale there are 4 stages: adoption, trial, assess and “hold, reduce”.
Adoption means that Software AG makes a “clear recommendation to customers” to adopt the technology. Trial means that “the technology is very useful to most”, with adoption being evaluated in a “trial project with manageable risk” to measure the specific value to an organization and in some cases to assess its maturity.
Technologies in the assessing stage have potential, but the adoption depends on an individual cost/value/risk assessment. If a technology is in the last category “hold, reduce”, the company advises against using the technology.
IOTA is far ahead of competing blockchains
According to Software AG’s evaluation, the blockchain and distributed ledger technology only receives the “assess” seal. As the German-based company notes, blockchain and DLTs are still a clearly “over-hyped technology looking for business applications that it can solve better than any existing alternative (e.g., centralized SaaS).”
For example, according to Software AG, despite many claims to the contrary, “there are almost no truly productive use cases except crypto exchanges. Many (if not all) productive solutions presented refer to very small pilot or test deployments of economically irrelevant size and impact on a company”. Nevertheless, the company attributes enormous potential to the technology, but only in three to eight years’ time:
DLTs can become a real game changer due to their innate properties (such as decentralization, trustlessness, smart contracts, crypto assets incl. currencies) in certain competitive niches once they have been identified.Governmental-defined crypto currencies (e.g., a “digital Euro”), assets (e.g., shares in companies) or other tokens (e.g., decentralized identifiers, DIDs) will become available in 3-8 years increasing possibilities and pressure to digitize businesses and processes.
A user on Twitter asked Strnadl whether the evaluation also applies to the IOTA Tangle. Strnadl pointed out that IOTA is rather on a level with Open Telemetry, which is already in the testing phase. According to Strnadl, a separate report on IOTA is still being prepared:
I am working on an #SAGTechRadar entry for #IOTA right now — which will be definitely much farther to the right on the adoption scale and higher up on the relevance scale. My first guess is somewhere in the vicinit of “Open Telemetry”. But this is also a team assessment.