At its Oracle OpenWorld conference this week in San Francisco, the company announced its new Blockchain Cloud Service. The distributed ledger cloud platform aims to help enterprises make various transactions more secure, using blockchain technology. The new service — which is fully managed by Oracle — is part of Oracle’s Cloud Platform.

"We’re introducing blockchain, both as a platform-as-a-service and as a way to do secure transactions: intercompany accounting transactions, procurement transactions, and loyalty programs that span multiple providers in a loyalty network, using blockchain to handle the secure hyperledger,” said Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle, at this week’s conference.

Oracle is building its blockchain service on top of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger open source software. Oracle joined the Hyperledger project in August.

The company says it’s uniquely positioned to use blockchain to accelerate on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) and cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) and PaaS, which are key offerings provided by Oracle.

Oracle’s blockchain service will help speed business processes by validating information in real-time. It will also help automate transactions across organizations, mitigate security and privacy risks, and simplify compliance and audits. Oracle is using a REST API-driven approach for customers to integrate the blockchain services.

*SDxCentral Senior Editor Jessica Lyons Hardcastle contributed to this report.