Editor’s Note: This post comes from Anna Shugol, Blockchain IT specialist and zChampion from IBM Montpellier Client Center. Last fall, she lead a Blockchain hackathon where students used mainframe for building their applications. Open Mainframe Project sponsored this event, just as it sponsors internships and other education efforts on mainframe around the world.
Blockchain is a cutting edge technology and has all the potential to change the way how business is done across many industries. The spark that has initially ignited the enterprise world has gone way further.
It is interesting to watch how blockchain technology is being so rapidly adopted not only in the business sector, but also by emerging startups, IT developer communities and students. The latter bring new fresh ideas, solutions with a combination of different technologies and as a result – projects that have all the potential to revolutionize all industries.
IBM has been always supporting students and all IT developers and enthusiasts in their innovation discovery journey and what can be more fun than exploring emerging technologies through the hackathon? Considering this IBM Montpellier Blockchain Center of Competency and Open Mainframe Project have launched a Blockchain Hackathon for EPSI University in France.
During 5 days approximately 300 students from 9 cities in France were collaborating together under the guidance from worldwide IBM Blockchain specialists to design new creative solutions and projects. We were delighted to see students’ enthusiasm and innovative thinking – their projects were aimed to change the retail, healthcare and public industries.
Students were using Hyperledger Fabric (http://hyperledger-fabric.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), an open source blockchain framework developed under the governance of the Linux Foundation to produce their own creative solutions. Hyperledger Composer, also an open source IDE platform (https://hyperledger.github.io/composer/) was used as a tooling for developing blockchain networks.
IBM LinuxONE Community Cloud and Developer Journey (https://github.com/IBM/hyperledger-fabric-on-linux-one) provide an environment to accelerate solutions’ deployment. Anyone can sign up for free trial access to LinuxONE Community Cloud and follow the Developer Journey scenario to create their own solutions. The combination of open source technologies and LinuxONE -an enterprise Linux sever – allowed students to make the best out of this two worlds.
Open Mainframe Project and IBM decided to invite two winning teams to IBM Montpellier, where the students have spent the full day working with IBM Blockchain specialists, discovering how they can make their solutions even better, and also learnt about IBM Quantum Computing, Cloud and other fast paced technologies.
We hope that this is a start of a great collaboration between IT professionals and students and a foundation for a successful future.
Congratulations to the Blockchain Hackathon winners!
3 winning teams:
1st place (“AlphaBets”): Blockchain platform for keeping & managing online bets (football matches, games, poker etc); EPSI Montpellier
2nd place (CuraChain): Blockchain platform for keeping track of the medical procedures and patient history; EPSI Bordeaux
3rd place (“TrustMotor”): Blockchain platform for used car parts provenance. EPSI Grenoble
IBM Montpellier Blockchain Center of Competency would like to thank Jennifer Foley, Steve LaFalce, Eva Yan, John Mertic and Open Mainframe Project for their outstanding support.
