Automatic processing on internal company systems with Smart Contracts?

Question

I'm very new to blockchain and smart contracts. I have given some thought to how Smart Contracts can help in internal business processes. My consideration is as follows: Let’s assume that a condition in a Smart Contract is not met and therefore a predefined internal company process is initiated.

Question: Is it now possible that this Smart Contract, which is running on the blockchain, automatically executes processes on the company's internal systems (e.g. SAP)? For example, internal processes for a complaint?

Would be very grateful for your answers.

Excuse me for my bad english

Best regards

Answer 1

It's a bit late but now there is aeternity working a fully layer 1 oracles to provide information from the outside world.

A good example here:

https://github.com/aeternity/tipping-oracle-service

Answer 2

It still depends. It is possible with smart-contracts in general(not ethereum). You can check out some Enterprise-Oriented blockchains(like Hyperledger Fabric/Iroha/Sawtooth etc.) - it's possible to achieve what do you want there.

If we are talking about ethereum smart-contracts, the short answer is NO. The problem that smart-contracts are not allowed to iniate any actions by themselves. All the actions must be called by somebody. But here you can see an option: write a web-service which will call smart-contract method once in %period of time%, smart-contract checks self state and make some actions according to this state. Another problem is that smart-contracts in Ethereum are isolated from the outside world. So they even can't use web-services and grab information out of blockchain out of the box. But there are also some solutions(so-called Oracles) like Oraclize which can help you to break this barriers.

There are also some blockchains with oracles out of the box like Aeternity are coming up.

Wrapping everything up - yes, you can. But it's not that simple