Today’s enterprises rely heavily on information systems to enable their business processes, which are usually managed and controlled by the respective enterprises. However, there are a lot more multilateral transactions in the modern business value cycle. These span cross-enterprise and require faster, reliable access to the latest, comprehensive information about the transactions to make them more effective and, eventually, lead to better collaboration among enterprises.

The reality, however, is that with decentralized information systems and each participant managing their version of truth, enterprises end up having an opaque information architecture resulting in information discrepancies, countless reconciliations, unproductive person-hours spent resolving these, increased operational risk, weakened trust, and increased cost.

Decentralization by way of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a step towards addressing these issues, enabling companies to jointly manage, operate and use a platform to maintain a single version of truth across participants and strong cryptography to create trust and immutability, which helps reduce the issues mentioned above. The objective is to deliver tamper-proof data and transparency to all network participants in a consensually-agreed manner.

Distributed Ledger Technology has evolved and matured over the last few years. While it came about with cryptocurrencies, the application of this technology in alternative use cases can benefit enterprises, and adoption of DLT is on the rise across industries.

This perspective paper addresses the evolution and application of DLT in enterprises, and how it can be further embraced to realize potential across multilateral solutions. To learn more about the pillars and eminent platforms of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), key challenges and industry use cases, download the prespective paper.