How would you like to see your business becoming 40% more efficient? Sounds like a "too good to be true" sales pitch from a crazed salesperson, doesn't it? However, in this case it's not. CNET is reporting that IBM has released a report on its partnership with global shipping giant Maersk, and according the head of their blockchain division, shipping times have been reduced on average by 40% by utilizing their blockchain offering.

The IBM-Maersk collaboration, nicknamed "TradeLens", is still in its infancy, and has 94 early adopters in its currently closed partnership, but is looking to roll out the offering substantially later this year.

For those of you who still think blockchain is a whim, it's time to wake up and smell the coffee (the imported coffee, that is).

(Cindy Taylor/Publisher)

"Logging a million events per day

That work is in the proof-of-concept stage. IBM's TradeLens service is part of IBM's early adopter program, but it's up and running in the real world. It captures more than a million shipping events each day, 154 million in total so far...

TradeLens for now has been a closed partnership, but that's changing. "We're anticipating opening up general availability for anybody who wants to join later this year," Wieck said. Cryptocurrencies use public blockchains, which means anyone can operate a node on the network and contribute transactions, but TradeLens uses a more restrictive "permissioned" approach with some controls on participation. It maintains the core blockchain idea of distributing data across multiple servers, though.

Also Thursday, IBM opened a programming interface that will let other companies' computer systems interact with the blockchain. IBM charges for access to the TradeLens, offering it online as software as a service and sharing revenue with founding partners.

IBM has found it's needed to make course corrections with TradeLens -- for example, in the types of documents stored on the blockchain and the "onboarding" process to enlist new partners. But when done right, the blockchain greases the wheels of commerce...:

Full Story at CNET