Seagate and IBM Partner to Track Products with Blockchain

A partnership between Seagate and IBM aims to improve the trackability of goods being sent by Seagate to customers around the globe. As the world leader in external hard disks, Seagate sends it’s products all across the world and wants to harness the power of distributed ledger to ensure customers can track their product as well as verify the authenticity of the piece. This project will offer benefits both ways and ensure data privacy is maintained, as reported by Forbes, July 30, 2019.

Improving Customer Experience

The entire effort by Seagate and IBM can be crunched down to a shared vision of garnering consumer trust. Supply chain management itself has become one of the most sought after use cases for blockchains, but this particular solution seems to be a cut above the rest.

Seagate not only wants to allow consumers to verify their product and track it through a distributed ledger; they also want to ensure that when customers return products, they are receiving a genuine piece and not a counterfeit one.

The tracking details with which the product is sent can be used to verify the authenticity on either side. Supply chain solutions that utilize the blockchain have been used solely for tracking and origin tracing.

In this case, the ability of the company to gain the trust of customers while simultaneously reducing their own internal fraud is truly commendable.

Seagate previously launched a proof of concept with IBM to show the natural synergy between the use of blockchain and their products. After a management review of this process, they decided to launch the pilot and get the project on its feet.

Data Management With a Touch of Integrity

When hard drives are returned for whatever reasons, there is still some amount of data from the previous owner. The company has introduced a potential solution called ‘certified erase’ that ensures a hard disk is cryptographically erased. If the information is no longer there, the risks under global data privacy laws are greatly reduced.

By recording this erasure on the blockchain along with supply details, the company now has an immutable database that stands as proof that they did not violate any data privacy laws.

Seagate’s blockchain solution is a prime example of leveraging technology to improve customer experience while also mitigating your own internal risks.