Enterprise

Enterprise blockchain has been a dud. These two AWS vets think they can make it work.

Vendia, founded by Tim Wagner and Shruthi Rao, wants to help companies build real-time, decentralized data applications. Its product allows enterprises to more easily share code and data across clouds, regions, companies, accounts, and technology stacks.

Shruthi Rao and Tim Wagner talking

“We have this thesis here: Cloud was always the missing ingredient in blockchain, and Vendia added it in,” Wagner (right) told Protocol of his and Shruthi Rao's company.

Photo: Vendia

The promise of an enterprise blockchain was not lost on CIOs — the idea that a database or an API could keep corporate data consistent with their business partners, be it their upstream supply chains, downstream logistics, or financial partners.

But while it was one of the most anticipated and hyped technologies in recent memory, blockchain also has been one of the most failed technologies in terms of enterprise pilots and implementations, according to Vendia CEO Tim Wagner.

“We sometimes joke at Vendia that we love nothing better than a failed blockchain experiment,” Wagner said. “Blockchain has certainly gone through this amazing hype cycle. We’re in that post trough-of-disillusionment phase. Probably half of our deals in the last year are replacements of failed blockchain attempts.”

The operational challenges of blockchain technology, including single-machine limitations, lack of throughput and scalability, high costs, and the difficulty of integration, meant that many pilots failed to deliver value, according to Wagner.

To solve those problems, he and fellow co-founder Shruthi Rao, Vendia’s chief business officer, reimagined the idea of blockchains and distributed ledgers in a cloud-native way, launching Vendia in 2020. Its fully managed and serverless Vendia Share platform for building real-time, decentralized data applications allows customers to more easily share code and data across clouds, companies, geographic regions, accounts, and technology stacks.

Shruthi Rao and Tim Wagner smiling to the cameraShruthi Rao and Tim Wagner reimagined the idea of blockchains and distributed ledgers in a cloud-native way, launching Vendia in 2020.Photo: Vendia

“We have this thesis here: Cloud was always the missing ingredient in blockchain, and Vendia added it in,” Wagner said. “We took this very different approach, this very cloud-friendly, cloud-scaling-type approach to building it, so at the core of our technology is a cloud-centric blockchain. By building it in the cloud, we have access to essentially unlimited amounts of storage, unlimited amounts of network capacity, unlimited amounts of processing capacity. That makes it possible for us to do things that conventional blockchains can’t: [Deliver] much higher throughput, lower latency, more processing power, lots more parallelism, easier integration.”

Vendia has received $50 million in funding to date. Its customers range from startups to large mid-market and enterprise companies across markets such as settling roaming charges in Africa and Asia for telecom providers; airline supply chains; large-scale construction management; and the mortgage, hospitality, and automotive industries. They include BMW, Aerotrax Technologies, and consulting firm Slalom.

“We typically replace early attempts to use Hyperledger Fabric or Quorum or one of these other systems,” Wagner said. “But a lot of it, frankly, is companies who are staring at the high cost of building it all out in a custom way through a custom development in-house or outsourced versus trying to get it as a platform. One of the hardest things a company can do is ensure that their data and their partners’ data is always correct, consistent, complete, and up to date.”

The AWS connection

Prior to starting Vendia, Rao had been head of business development for blockchain at AWS, including its Amazon Managed Blockchain product that supports the open-source HyperLedger Fabric. Wagner had been using the same technology at cryptocurrency company Coinbase.

“The interesting question we kept asking ourselves was, ‘What’s the problem, what’s the missing ingredient here?’” Wagner said. “I would sum it up simply as just saying this first generation of blockchain technology ignored the cloud. They ignored scalability, they ignored cloud integration, they ignored the fact that everyone else was migrating to the cloud.”

Rao said she met 1,092 unique customers while at AWS. No matter what industry they were involved in — financial services, energy, media, entertainment, gaming — they all had one big story of why they were “desperately” trying to use blockchains, according to Rao. The customers said they had many partners, invested in lots of data-making mechanisms — from IoT and mobile to edge computing and digital transformation — but the enormous amounts of data produced by those activities were getting stuck in partner and cloud silos.

“For these companies, the problem was, ‘We’re not getting access to our data that we need to make real-time decisions in a meaningful time so we can respond to market changes rapidly,’” Rao said. “Irrespective of how much investments they’ve made in AI and ML and analytics and all of these wonderful data-crunching mechanisms, they were just getting a small sliver of data.”

“I would sum it up simply as just saying this first generation of blockchain technology ignored the cloud.”

Wagner, meanwhile, had been vice president of engineering in 2018 and 2019 at pre-IPO Coinbase, which was running some of the largest regulated distributed ledgers in North America.

“I had this just sad realization that while cryptocurrencies and distributed ledgers were sort of working for speculation, they didn’t really work for enterprises,” he said.

Before joining Coinbase, Wagner spent about six years at AWS and started what’s now known as its serverless division — which included AWS Lambda, its serverless compute service — with Rao eventually running business development for the group.

“When I created Lambda, it was about democratizing and simplifying access to the cloud versus going and renting a server from AWS,” Wagner said. “We kind of think of Vendia as a similar idea: It’s about democratizing and simplifying blockchain capabilities for customers who then don’t really have to understand how that works. We deliver it in the SaaS fashion. They don’t have to deploy it, and frankly, they don’t even really have to understand it. They can get the business value out of it without necessarily becoming experts in writing solidity or hiring Hyperledger Fabric developers or any of those pieces.”

‘A sense of business urgency’

Vendia launched just after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which further highlighted corporate challenges in the supply chain and pressure on the travel industry, particularly airlines.

“It took what was already a wonderful sort of addressable market for us and added a sense of business urgency,” Wagner said. “[It] created even more of an awareness and focus on the limitations and lack of appropriate data-sharing mechanisms, of cross-company data-sharing needs and requirements. The focus on cost-cutting and efficiency and passenger experiences, corporate travel, and the need for corporations to be able to replan their travel — some of those have actually been very beneficial for us.”

One of Vendia’s airline customers has about eight joint-venture partners to get passengers to their destinations. When a customer books a flight from San Francisco to Cancún, Mexico, for example, that airline would fly the passenger from San Francisco to Dallas, and one of its partners would then handle the Dallas-to-Cancún leg of the trip.

The initial passenger booking would come to the airline through its Salesforce CRM system. To convey needed information to its joint-venture partner handling the flight from Dallas to Cancún, in the past, Vendia’s customer would download its Salesforce data into an Excel spreadsheet and clean up some of the macros so it only shared information that the partner needed to see, such as the trip segment, the passenger’s name, the passenger name record number, the date, seat number, and other details. It would then send the information to the partner, which could be using a different CRM system.

“I had this just sad realization that while cryptocurrencies and distributed ledgers were sort of working for speculation, they didn’t really work for enterprises.”

“It’s all very manual, it’s all very duct-tapey, and throw in the fact that they have eight joint venture partners and many, many more code-share and segment-share partners … The point-to-point-to-point integration, especially on these complex flights, becomes that much harder,” Rao said.

Vendia Share instead takes care of orchestrating the data-sharing among the different airlines. The product enables businesses to have full visibility into all activities and transactions without worrying about their origin, as transactions are immutable through the power of distributed ledger technology, according to Rao.

“We make sure that whoever is supposed to get the data gets the data in real time, within five milliseconds, so there’s no back and forth of manual movement,” Rao said. “And everything is on the ledger so you can see who you shared [with], what you shared, when you shared … and you can do fine-grained analysis of what has been shared.”

Support for AWS is generally available, support for Microsoft Azure is in beta, and Google Cloud Platform support is targeted for the first quarter, according to the company.

Vendia announced its latest funding, a $30 million Series B round, led by NewView Capital, in May. The company, which has just under 100 employees, is using that money to scale its engineering and continue building out its cross-cloud platform, including support for Google Cloud Platform.

“There’s just this general idea to meet customers where they are: the cloud that they’re on, the APIs or data access that they prefer to use, the systems that they have their data in, like Salesforce, for example,” Wagner said. “On the go-to-market side … we’ve pushed into automotive, into the travel sector and financial services — that’s kind of where we got started — and they all have some really amazing business networks and use cases for us to tap. But they’re equally exciting and challenging opportunities in health care, in energy and consumer goods, and lots of these other spaces as well. To get there, we need a larger go-to-market team and more collateral. So that’ll be the other opportunity: to use those funds to grow out and expand our sector penetration.”

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins