When we say Corda is designed specifically for enterprises, we mean it!

I’ve spent a lot of time with clients recently and it’s been thrilling to hear how so many of the unique design decisions we’ve made with Corda really resonate.

R3 has been building this new open-source distributed ledger platform in close collaboration with hundreds of senior technologists from across our global financial services membership. And that’s why Corda resonates with business people, because it was designed from the ground up to solve a real business problem: helping firms automate and manage their dealings with each other with legal certainty and without duplication, error and unnecessary reconciliation. Applying the essential insight of blockchain intelligently to the world of commerce.

Corda: inspired by blockchain systems but built from the ground up with the needs of today’s businesses in mind.

But Corda also resonates with technologists in these firms.  This is because we designed Corda to be deployable and manageable in the complex reality of today’s IT landscape. This sounds mundane but turns out to be critical, as I’ll explain in this article.

Corda: the only DLT platform that has been designed to make your IT department smile!

The core reason that Corda appeals to IT departments is simple: we’ve designed it so they can understand it, deploy it and manage it without having to unnecessarily rethink everything about how they operate. For example, Corda runs on the Java platform, it uses existing enterprise database technology for its storage, and it uses regular message queue technology to move data around.

These details seem small, but they turn out to be absolutely crucial: they mean enterprise IT departments already know how to deploy and manage Corda! It means that firms who select Corda will be able to get their solutions live so much quicker than those who mistakenly choose a different blockchain fabric.

No other DLT platform is as standards-compliant, interoperable or designed from the ground up to be deployed successfully into enterprise IT departments. And we’re not just talking about finance, by the way. Corda is applicable to every industry where needless duplication of data and process is prevalent: it turns out that if you can make it in finance, you can make it anywhere…

But this also leads us to another key point that explains why Corda is gaining so much interest: to get DLT projects live, multiple firms will have to move as one.

They will have to collaborate.

Corda is the product of R3, the largest-scale such collaboration the financial world has ever seen and this need for collaboration is hard-wired into its design. We’ve already discussed how Corda reuses existing standards wherever possible – massively simplifying the steps each firm seeking to deploy it needs to go through. But these insights go deeper. For example, there is usually a need to manage complex interfirm negotiations prior to committing a transaction, something enabled by Corda’s unique “flows” feature and entirely missing from other plaforms.

This need for collaboration is not restricted to large institutions themselves, of course. Getting complex DLT applications live requires partnership with implementation firms and software vendors.  Our obsession with collaboration is why Corda is so attractive to so many of these firms – our partners: they see that Corda is the right platform for business and in R3 they see a partner with collaboration in its DNA.

The reality is that there are actually very few fully open-source, credible, enterprise blockchain and DLT platforms, so when systems integrators respond to client requests for proposals, Corda is the one that many of them choose to bid.  This is not only because it is perfectly tailored for commerce but because it is the result of a genuine collaborative effort over which no one technology vendor, who may also be a competitor to them, has outsize influence: they can compete on a level playing field to serve their clients.

When you bring these strands together, it quickly becomes clear why Corda is appearing on everybody’s shortlist for projects right now.

Corda is the only enterprise DLT…

• … designed from the ground-up to solve real business problems with privacy, scalability and legal certainty engineered in from day one.
• … built to make the IT department smile
• … with collaboration in its DNA: engineered to be deployed between firms in a practical and realistic way
• … with a true ecosystem of partners competing to serve clients on a level playing field: no conflicts of interest, no fear of vendor lock-in.

As always, you can learn more about Corda at corda.net.  You can join our thriving community at slack.corda.net.  Our code is open-source and available at github.com/corda. And you can email us at partner@r3.com if you want to grow your business by building or deploying Corda solutions for your clients as one of our growing community of partners!