HomePortfolioA Blockchain-Based PoC to Achieve Transparency Across Software Downloads

A Blockchain-Based PoC to Achieve Transparency Across Software Downloads

Angular
Blockchain
Docker
JavaScript
Node.js

A software provider turned to Altoros to deliver a proof of concept— based on Hyperledger—for analyzing how users interact with products.

A Blockchain-Based PoC to Achieve Transparency Across Software Downloads

About the project

Brief results of the collaboration:

  • The delivered proof of concept (PoC) helps to analyze user interaction with a software e-commerce platform, while granting full transparency to all the parties involved.
  • With the PoC delivered in just 8 weeks, the customer was able to quickly evaluate whether blockchain fits this scenario and to start discussing a budget with an investor for developing a full-fledged product.
  • Altoros also automated blockchain network deployment across multiple instances, helping to reduce required operational efforts by 3x.

The customer

The company is an infrastructure software development provider based in the US. The organization operates globally and delivers its services to industry giants such as Air France–KLM, Bosch, and Lufthansa.

The need

The company distributes software through its e-commerce platform, where corporate customers can download a free trial version or purchase a paid one. The company wanted to achieve full transparency around user interaction for all the parties involved. In particular, the customer was seeking for a solution capable of tracking the number of downloads, installation/de-installation ratio, and expiry dates. The system also had to notify both the company’s sales team and corporate customers about product downloads and the expiration of trial periods via e-mail.

This way, the company aimed at providing equal opportunity for analyzing product preferences, managing the licenses purchased/budgets, and making informed decisions by all the users of its platform.

Looking for strong blockchain expertise, the customer turned to Altoros to develop a PoC of a system based on a shared ledger that can keep details of the monitored activities. To facilitate maintenance and development, there was also a need for extensive project documentation to serve as a knowledge base.

The challenge

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

  • To avoid manual actions, reduce time efforts, and minimize risks, it was necessary to automate the deployment as much as possible.
  • To enable the PoC to send e-mail alerts to various parties, our engineers had to overcome the issue of chaincode being triggered by external calls only.

The solution

Delivered in just 8 weeks, the solution was developed as a decentralized system. It emulates all user activities—from acceptance of terms and conditions to product purchase—and transfers this data to the blockchain layer for storage, monitoring, and analysis.

To automate network deployment across multiple instances, developers at Altoros customized a home-grown tool Ansible Fabric Starter which allowed for accelerating the process by a factor of 3.

To enable notifications about actions taken by a user, engineers at Altoros delivered a Node.js application connected to the chaincode. This allowed for sending alerts to both system administrators and users about product downloads, continued/rejected usage, and trial period expiry.

To help corporate users manage budgets effectively, our team also made it possible for them to monitor the portfolio of software chosen by their organization for evaluation or licensed usage.

In addition, experts at Altoros implemented functionality, which allowed system administrators to generate reports across the monitored activities by a product, a user, or a time period of interest. The reports could be exported either in the PDF or Excel formats.

The outcome

With a PoC delivered in only 8 weeks, the customer was able to quickly evaluate blockchain’s capability to store data about user interaction with products, while granting full transparency to all the parties involved.

The automated network deployment helped to reduce operational efforts by 3x. Now, the customer is in the process of discussing the solution with investors and planning the funding for further development of the product.

Technology stack

Platform

Hyperledger Fabric

Programming languages

JavaScript, Go

Technologies

Node.js, Angular, Docker, Ansible Fabric Starter

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Ryan Meharg

Ryan Meharg

Technical Director

ryan.m@altoros.com650 265-2266

4900 Hopyard Rd. Suite 100 Pleasanton, CA 94588