Wanda Group launches 'Hercules' blockchain solution to achieve 'blockchain + big data' integration

Dalian Wanda Group has announced the launch of a blockchain solution, ‘Hercules’, which was developed jointly by Wanda and major software company Cloudera.

Since the beginning of 2016, Cloudera has been optimistic about the development of blockchain and its potential in the big data market. On November 23, just a few weeks before the launch of the joint Wanda-Cloudera blockchain project 'Hercules', Cloudera Financial Services Specialist Mihaela Risca published a blog post: 'Blockchain in Financial Services - Hype or Reality?'

This blog post focuses on the implementation and utilization of blockchain technology in the big data market and includes input from Joao Salcedo, a core engineer at Cloudera who has been helping Cloudera design and implement big data solutions for the past three years.

Salcedo wrote:

“As big data enables more and more predictive modeling, blockchain technology can help turn those predictions into action. This technology can be combined with big data, layered into a reflective-predictive transformation process. This means analytics can help developers quantify the risks and benefits of modifications to blockchain protocols, as well as monitor troublesome behavior.”

Just 13 days after Salcedo and Risca published their article, Cloudera and Wanda formally reached a partnership.

Through this collaboration, the two companies will continue to develop the 'Hercules' project while trying to integrate their blockchain solutions into a wider range of industries. As Salcedo emphasized, Wanda and Cloudera are focusing on industries and companies that are highly dependent on big data and information technology.

According to Phoenix Finance, a spokesperson for Wanda Group said:

“The industry’s demand for big data and blockchain technology is growing, but there is currently no one-stop open source solution in the market that can meet all the needs of enterprises… Project Hercules is designed to make it easier for enterprise organizations to deploy and manage blockchain applications on existing big data clusters.”

After the announcement of the Hercules project, Wanda Group did not specify whether the company itself would adopt the technology and integrate Hercules into its existing systems. However, Phoenix.com believes that Wanda's financial group is most likely to use blockchain solutions to provide payment and financial information for its huge user base.

Although Wanda has not released more information about Hercules so far, the Cloudera team said that the project is committed to applying big data to the automatic execution of smart contracts and transaction analysis. Risca provided a diagram to demonstrate how big data can rely on secure and unchangeable blockchain data for information processing.

Currently, the big data industry is worth as much as $1.5 billion, and companies like Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba have all identified it as a key development area.

As blockchain technology becomes internationally recognized, its implementation across Asia is set to grow significantly, with Wanda and Cloudera looking to integrate Hercules and other future blockchain solutions into China’s big data market.