IBM has made its blockchain mainnet platform available in Melbourne, which allows customers to run applications on the IBM cloud. Sydney will be next by the end of March.

According to an article published on IT news portal ZDNet (Feb 11), head of blockchain and consulting practice leader for IBM in Australia and New Zealand Rupert Colchester said the reason for a second location is largely availability and redundancy.

“By its very nature, it’s a distributed ledger technology so often ledgers are running in different locations and the demand for two is through clients and customers in this geography wanting to have high availability in the event of downtime and the like,” he told ZDNet.

Colchester was also reported as saying that blockchain penetration is widely active and across all industries in Australia. IBM’s current other data centers are in Dallas, London, São Paulo, Tokyo, and Toronto.

The IBM platform is made from Hyperledger Fabric, which is hosted by the Linux Foundation aimed at improving cross-industry blockchain technology. Additionally, with the infrastructure inside the country, this increases security as the data will not cross borders, making the platform particularly useful for regulated applications in government and financial services.

Colchester added that the technology will provide the most common use case in supply chain business. He believes that Australia is the perfect host for the launch of the Blockchain project because of the high awareness organizations in the country have of blockchain and its applications.

Recently, IBM has been expanding its use of blockchain technology through various projects announced in quick succession – from monitoring groundwater in California and cobalt mining in the Congo, to healthcare in the US and shipping in Spain.