Enterprise Ethereum Alliance: potential game-changer?

We are holding a Meetup on Friday in honor of our great mate, Roy Smith, who started the Manila Ethereum Meetup in January 2015. Roy who is now living in Spain will be in Manila and we look forward to discuss with him his thoughts on the rising price of Ether and the launch of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

The newly formed Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) was launched last month to formalize the cooperation among 30 organizations coming together to focus on enterprise use cases of Ethereum. The alliance includes large established organizations like Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, Intel, Thomson Reuters and blockchain startups like BlockApps, String Labs and ConsenSys.

In the short term, the EEA has identified five goals for 2017, including:

1. Develop a sufficiently modular Ethereum implementation to separate and define clear interfaces between networking and storage layers - that is a prototype for pluggable consensus that minimizes the code changes required to switch consensus algorithms.
2. Experiment with potential consensus algorithms, along with data privacy and permissioning frameworks.
3. Develop a clear set of capabilities and performance characteristics that suit the needs of enterprises, including:
   a) 100 transactions per second, across a 10 party network
   b) High volume and value use cases
   c) High availability/reliability
   d) Parallelization and horizontal scaling

4. Develop a Version 1 specification for Enterprise Ethereum, based on the learnings from the above plus the roadmap and requirements gathered from members, i.e., produce a reference implementation.
5. Leverage a robust governance process to ensure alignment and agreement on approaches.

What do you think will be the impact of EEA? Do you believe in their Vision? Is this just another PR or would this alliance significantly move the technology forward and in particular pave the way toward simpler Blockchain-as-a-Service (Baas) platform?

Plenty to talk about, so see you on Friday.