What is the go-to solution when 2 enterprises wish to communicate with each other. Right! Its via APIs, that too using REST APIs, with appropriate security in place.
Typically this involves one of the companies developing webservices and exposing those services, to be consumed by another enterprise. There are several constraining factors for this kind enterprise integration:
The webservices paradigm is uni-directional, that is, if org A, invokes a webservice hosted by org B, for org B, to confirm that desired state changes have occured, org B must call another webservice hosted by org A. This is essentially the issue, that the webservice calls are stateless. There is no state sharing at all between the organizations.
For true leverage and reuse of the webservices, there needs to be orchestration at the consumer side. This orchestration is not transparent to the provider of webservices.
The communication is primarily point to point. So the interactions, cannot be scaled easily if newer participants join in. Imagine 4 organizations, each one trying to call services into others and trying to keep track of some shared state, using and exposing status calls
All the above issues are elegantly solved using the "shared state" paradigm of blockchain. All participants talk to the blockchain almost as if it were a logical messaging bus, but more importantly, the bus is not just a physical connection, but maintains state in distributed ledger and also has smart contracts that can house, common and transparent pieces of code, that can be shared across the un-trusting organizations aka partners
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