Veni, vidi, Vendia?

Protocol Enterprise

Hello, and welcome to Protocol Enterprise! Today: why two AWS veterans think they’ve solved the riddle of the enterprise blockchain, get ready for increased scrutiny of businesses with ties to China, and a new round of Russian cyberattacks might be on the horizon.

The blockchain gang

The idea of a cloud-centric approach to solving the challenges enterprises have using the blockchain for sharing data was one of those “aha” moments, according to Tim Wagner, co-founder and CEO of Vendia.

“It is one of those things that you feel sort of the heel of your hand to your forehead like, ‘Duh, why hasn't anybody built this?’” Wagner told Protocol in a recent interview.

Wagner and co-founder Shruthi Rao, both veterans of AWS, launched Vendia in 2020.
They reimagined the idea of blockchains and distributed ledgers in a cloud-native way with Vendia Share, a fully managed and serverless platform for building real-time, decentralized data applications.
“We have this thesis here: Cloud was always the missing ingredient in blockchain, and Vendia added it in,” Wagner said. “At the core of our technology is a cloud-centric blockchain.”

Vendia Share allows customers to more easily share code and data across clouds, companies, geographic regions, accounts, and technology stacks.

It 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,” she said.

A database or an API that could keep corporate data consistent with their business partners — be it their upstream supply chains, downstream logistics, or financial partners — was a compelling prospect that was not lost on CIOs, according to Wagner.

But the first generation of blockchain technology ignored the cloud and presented operational hurdles, including single-machine limitations, lack of throughput and scalability, high costs, and the difficulty of integration, according to Wagner.
“We sometimes joke at Vendia that we love nothing better than a failed blockchain experiment,” he said. “Probably half of our deals in the last year are replacements of failed blockchain attempts.”
With Vendia Share built in the cloud, there’s access to essentially unlimited amounts of storage and network and 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,” Wagner said.

Read the full story here.

— Donna Goodison (email | twitter)

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Securing the enterprise

In today’s global landscape, cybersecurity threats are something that every business operating on the internet must face, not just enormous tech companies. In this Protocol virtual event on Oct. 4 at 10 a.m. PT, we’ll examine the current best practices for securing both large and small- to medium-sized businesses, providing viewers with a true threat landscape and information they can use to make decisions about the strategy that best supports their business goals.

Protocol Enterprise’s Kyle Alspach will be joined by a great panel of speakers: Andrew Rubin, co-founder and CEO, Illumio; Alex Weinert, vice president and director of identity security, Microsoft; Jameeka Green Aaron, chief information security officer, Auth0; and Devdatta Akhawe, head of security. Figma.

RSVP here.

China syndrome

Brisk political winds are chilling tech business relations between the U.S. and China, and perhaps more than anything right now, companies with business in China are fretting over one thing the U.S. government could do: change the rules for investments flowing from China into the U.S.

To protect against cybersecurity vulnerabilities and exploitation of Americans’ data, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Sept. 15 directing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS (pronounced “sif-ee-us” by foreign investment watchers), to consider scrutinizing foreign investments through the lens of national security risks.

“Everybody recognizes the need to protect U.S. national security. But as Congress and the administration consider new tools, like an outbound investment review regime, it is critical that they get real input from the business community and be precise in what they’re trying to cover,” Rory Murphy, vice president of Government Affairs at the US-China Business Council, told Protocol yesterday.

The oft-stated mission of ensuring U.S. leadership in emerging tech is at the heart of this potential shift. During a press briefing, a senior administration official listed a “handful of priority emerging and critical technologies, like semiconductors, quantum technologies, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence, as well as supply chain considerations” as areas where investment reviews could happen.

The elephant in the room here is China, a country “of special concern” that has tech strategies that many in U.S. government believe threaten U.S. leadership in areas related to national security.

But because AI is intertwined with all industries and the technologies they use, AI deals could be subject to excessive review if a CFIUS rule is written too broadly. “How AI is defined will be important in determining what types of transactions are covered,” Murphy said.

— Kate Kaye (email| twitter)

Around the enterprise

We kind of already knew this, but there’s increased evidence that Russian hackers are working in conjunction with the Russian military as Ukraine starts to get the upper hand in the seven-month war kicked off by Russia’s invasion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

IBM acquired Dialexa, a hybrid-cloud consulting firm based out of Texas, as it continues to look for ways to hang on to existing customers by offering cloud expertise.