R3’s Corda Drive on The Great Indian RoadShow

R3’s Corda Drive on The Great Indian RoadShow

It’s May 2019, when blockchain technology has already achieved half of its potential wherein intellects have already diagnosed the great capacity of this technology and what’s rolling out is actual implementation which would be inevitably followed by amazing success stories.

In midst of this anarchic but hopeful era R3 must be crowned as the leader to introduce ambitious DLT platform “CORDA” with an aim to regulate the blockchain space for infinite business activities.

The world already knows that India is a super power in the field of information technology and its flexible capacity to absorb new technology. Accordingly R3 flexed its arms to reach out to the Indian developer community by arranging a well-planned marathon roadshow to help create awareness about corda.

So for this India roadshow R3 assembled the avengers like Mr. Mike Ward Head of Product, Mr Vivek Gupta India R3 Head, Mr Florian Friemel , Mr Ashutosh Meher and Ms Sneha Damle the corda evangelists with Mr Niki Ariyasinghe R3 APAC head to direct and manage the entire boulevard.

Chennai 4th and 5th MAY

Vision It Park — Boot Camp

After landing in Chennai from London, we flagged our first open bootcamp at vision tech park on 4th May. It was a great warm up with 70 assorted developers who had already dipped their hands in corda and wanted to learn more along with few curious and inquisitive ones. Our team gave an interactive presentation and tried to solve lot of follow up questions from the developer community, followed by hands on session. The knowledge and enthusiasm among the developers was pretty impressive.

It won’t be out of context to share a discussion with a participant about her use case — “storage of university certificates and degrees of students which can be accessed via a shared ledger for further references including during hiring, employments etc”. Similarly, people were inquisitive about Corda’s cloud strategy and also certain questions were asked about HSM implementations. Similar fascinating ideas/ questions were shared by various developers with lot of requests for advanced sessions. At the end of the hands-on session everyone walked out of the room after developing a Corda app themselves.

Intellect Designs ltd

On 5th May, our team was invited by “Intellect Designs ltd” an aspiring Fin-tech Company who has bagged various multi-million dollar technology deals and are working closely with the Government of India for digitalisation of economy. Karthik from Intellect design helped organise this session.

Our team gave a useful presentation of Demo Bench application and had a brief interaction with the company’s Tech heads, Architects and Developers. They were particularly interested to understand Corda applicability in Trade Finance, Loan Securitisation etc.

Hyderabad 7th may

Tech Mahindra

On a quick day journey in Hyderabad our team had a great advanced session with the Blockchain Training Program head- Mr Nagireddy Sv along with Architects and a bunch of developers from ‘Tech Mahindra’ a reputed Indian IT Firm.

Their major interests were related to the deployment perspective of corda and they were also were keen to know about Hybrid deployments.

Bangalore 8th to 11th May

Mind Tree, HCL, Wipro

On 8th May our team had a great session with marque IT players — Mind Tree and HCL.

Their tech heads and architects had various queries about Corda implementation, confidential identities, HA nodes implementation etc.

HCL’s team was highly impressive who have an interesting POC developed using fabric on Loan Syndication which they wish to experiment with CORDA. HCL developers from all over India had flown for the sessions which shows their keen interests and seriousness about CORDA.

Next 2 days our entire energy was aligned with Indian Tech Giants Infosys and Wipro.

With both these companies we had an advanced and deep dive sessions of Corda applicability and usage. I must say we can write a full blog about our experience with both these companies and their enthusiasm about Corda.

To summarise, the key discussions and observations were as follows –

1. Infosys already has a well-structured Corda and blockchain Technical Training Centre wherein they are training developers to hop on Corda and other blockchain systems to aid them in utilising the same to its maximum potential. They already have use cases like supply chain and syndicate lending.

2. Our team did a great hands-on session with 20 Corda specialists by developing a live Corda app and connecting it to an external doorman and network map. Florian did a great job by presenting a customised advanced session and we had a brief discussion on data migration.

3. Infosys queries were related to restrict access/visibility at Corda state-field level, how to restrict permission for a user access to Corda App, authentication/authorization implementation, Corda 3 to 4 Migration etc.

4. With Wipro as well our team had good deep dive sessions whereby Corda possibilities were explored who also had similar queries.

Our team squeezed in a short meet up of few people on the 10th night in Bangalore with developers and people from business side as well. It was good networking opportunity and created good awareness about Corda. We also met a person from a startup who had flown from Hyderabad to understand how does our partner management works.

Next day on 11th, Wipro was kind enough to invite our team for an open bootcamp session with participants from Tech and business side. A response of 300 registrations and a turnout of 100 odd crown was reported in this session. Our team displayed the CORDA strength and took up various follow up questions from various sectors. The crowd was completely enthusiastic, and it must be noted that various business side people also developed simple CorDapps. A strong presence in this boot camp was shown by “Intel developers” who actively joined the session.

With this we wrapped up our Bangalore leg, IT capital of India and flew to our next stop — KOCHI.

Kochi 12th & 13th May

Kerela Blockchain Academy — Bootcamp

One of the best sessions our team had was that with ‘Kerala Blockchain Academy’ which is — ‘An initiative of IIITM-K & Govt. of Kerala to Leverage Blockchain for Public Good.’

They were warm and took complete efforts for a successful bootcamp session at the awe inspiring Maker village — “Maker Village is the largest electronic hardware incubator and ESDM facility in the country, which is a pioneering startup initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India with Indian Institute of Information Technology, Trivandrum as the implementation agency and Kerala Startup Mission as the supporting partner.” Mr Narayanan V R, Mr Nithin p ajayan took care of the entire logistics and gave us a warm welcome for the bootcamp.

Sneha and Ashutosh presented this session with 40–45 the young developer minds who reciprocated with a promise to carry the knowledge and the usage of Corda in their further careers in different applications.

Tata Consultancy Services

On the 12th may our team had most impressive and Deep Dive session with 20 odd Group of Developers, Architects, productions deployments infrastructure team of the TCS one of the front runners in Indian IT industry.

Our team was highly impressed with the knowledge and use of TCS folks with regards to Corda and it must be noted that, they are ready and loaded with apps and keen to go live with our help.

Few of the interesting questions and queries were

· Purging of DB data guidelines

· Possibility of a tool at network level for reconciliation reports of data

· Data migration strategy if n banks are involved

· Guidelines for setting local prod level doormen

· Question around Percona Notary Cluster

· Queries regarding contract upgrades

· They have various documentation concerns

· Questions around docker

Key developer with TCS namely Vidhun, Neenu, Pornima and Bejoy are ready to closely work with Corda team for actual deployment.

Digiledge

Of hand while in Kochi, Corda partner Digiledge who already has a live system on CORDA invited us to have a brief discussion and deep dive session with regards to Digiledge’s International remittance platform which helps banks and money exchange houses to improve the operational efficiency of international money transfer process by exploiting the properties of distributed ledger.

At the outset the Indian roadshow was a well organised and a detailed schedule and completely successful.

Overall the main highlights and learning is that

· India is already well aware about the blockchain capacity and its a great emerging market for CORDA and regulated blockchain systems.

· This roadshow further displayed that there is a significant and serious interest in Corda’s use and various development on the platform for business enterprise.

· But what is fascinating is that the top Indian it companies and giants, Indian intellects and Indian business analysts are already actively involved with CORDA which is a feather in the cap for R3.

Sneha Damle, R3 Corda Developer Evangelist

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R3’s Corda Drive on The Great Indian RoadShow was originally published in Corda on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.