This chapter introduces and explores a new concept—a business network. By understanding what business networks are and how they function, you'll be able to understand how blockchain technology can radically improve them. A blockchain, and in particular a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, provides significant benefits for business networks because it radically simplifies the information and processes that knit businesses together, both reducing cost and creating new opportunities for the businesses within the network.
We'll see how the concept of a business network allows you to analyze a business by looking at the counterparties with which it interacts. And although business networks are industry specific, a single network can be used to support multiple use cases, and linked to other business networks to form networks of networks.
We'll spend some time introducing the vocabulary of business network, introducing key terms such as participants, assets, transactions and events. These elements are then combined to define the behaviour of the business problem being analyzed. We're able to use business requirement to create a technology blueprint that can be used to implement the solution. By the end of this chapter, you'll be ready to use Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer to implement these ideas, which you will do in the following chapter.
While the idea of a business network is necessary to understand before you implement a blockchain network, you'll find it a helpful concept for wider issues such as performing blockchain analytics, integrating with existing systems, and how to structure your application and enterprise architectures. In this sense, this chapter can be read stand-alone without implementing a network afterwards.
We will be covering the following topics in this chapter:
- A language for business networks
- The concept of a business network
- Defining business networks
- Introducing participants
- Introducing assets
- Introducing transactions
- Introducing events
- Implementing a business network