Gen10 Seeks Plateau of Productivity Amidst Blockchain Disillusionment
Over the last couple of years, Gen10 appears to us to have more or less completely reinvented itself. This feeling was confirmed in the last call that I had with CEO Richard Williamson this last week. Founded in 2000, Gen10 has delivered many projects across the commodities space. These days, Gen10 is focused on collaborative commodity management technology and it has built out a fairly complete approach to delivering on this vision, perhaps building on the insights and expertise gained over the last 19-years working successfully across the space. “The commodity and raw materials trade and its service providers need to drive down costs, create value from data and innovate. They are struggling with digital transformation. Tighter margins and democratized market data are forcing companies to transform their internal processes and to seek collaborative industry solutions with online platform and blockchain initiatives,” Richard told me.
In our last call, Richard alerted us about Gen10’s role in a new consortium founded by Rabobank, Aon, Concord Resources, Pacorini Global Services and Gen10. Gen10 are the technology and project lead that is creating an ecosystem of focused, fast-to-market, dApps that deliver efficiencies, control and innovation without requiring majority industry adoption. “Gen10’s technology, processes and experience are the key to the consortium’s ability to deliver more value, faster and at lower cost than the competition. This is being leveraged by the consortium to build the network. We are in a position to do this because of our platform CommOS™, which has productized the core building blocks of an enterprise solution for companies in the commodities supply chain.”
CommOS™, a mixture of Open source and G10 developed components, uses “a decoupled architecture of database, business logic and front-end user experience technologies in order to adapt effectively to the increasing pace of innovation, safeguarding against rebuilds or obsolescence. “ CommOS™ provides the means to use Gen10’s APIs and web services and enables inter-operability with other systems and services.
Blockchain and Distributed Ledger technologies have suffered from a degree of overhype and in reality, very few blockchain applications have been delivered in energy and commodities outside of some smart contracts and some small-scale usage within initiatives like VAKT. According to a recent FT article, too many projects have been started with the technology as opposed to a solution, and FinTech is disillusioned with it. “Gen10 is looking to be on the plateau of productivity rather than in the trough of disillusionment,” Richard told me. “We target focused areas of collaborative efficiency gains, controls and provenance and apply the technology building blocks to the solution dApp by dApp. That’s what got our first dAPP up and running in less than two months.”
ComTech will be waiting to see what Gen10 have managed to deliver in the blockchain area in the coming weeks and months and also watching developments with CommOS™.
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