When former Lotus Development heavyweight Ray Ozzie launched his latest venture, Groove Networks, the feeling of anticipation in the room was almost palpable. The assembled audience could hardly wait to see if Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, could parlay his huge success in the groupware market into a big win in the emerging world of peer-to-peer computing.
But what Ozzie deliveredâ€"an application development platform that enables users to share files and other content in real timeâ€"has more in common with Notes than it does with true peer computing products, such as Gnutella.
And that, observers and analysts say, could prevent Groove from taking the early lead in peer-to-peer computing, a market that is sure to be the subject of one of the bigger Internet land grabs.
At the product's core is Groove's "transceiver," a kind of browser that lets users trundle through portions of other users' hard drives to which they have been granted access. These so-called shared spaces can be set up quickly and are meant to allow small groups to share files associated with a particular project or subject.
All of the files are stored on each user's local machine, obviating the need for a central server, an architecture that many see as the future of computing.
"Those self-forming groups are the key to the way businesses operate now," Ozzie said.
Maybe so, but once you get past the buzz about peer-to-peer computing, Groove is likely to face many of the same problems and challenges that Lotus faced with Notes a decade ago. Touting the product as an application development platform instead of focusing on its core strengths could lead many in IT to question its value, much the way they did with Notes in the early years.
"No one buys development platforms; they buy applications," said analyst Ian Campbell of Nucleus Research. "The challenge is to have the businesspeople understand what you can do with it and have senior management see what it's for. They can get their hands around the basic function, but when you start talking about application development, you lose them."
Ozzie is banking on the belief that Groove will spawn the same kind of developer community that Notes did and is counting on these outside developers to be the public face of Groove and to deliver its marketing message. But, unlike the early 1990s when Notes was the only groupware platform to work on, several peer-to-peer technologies exist today, and each is vying for developers' attention.
And although Groove has signed up 11 development partners, even some of them don't believe that peer-to-peer is the cure-all for corporate collaborative woes.
"If you're involved in a large project, you don't necessarily want all of those files at the edge of the network," said Jim Heppelmann, executive vice president at Parametric Technology. The software vendor is one of Groove's development partners.
"You want to be able to grab subsets of the information from a server-based system and then work with it on something like Groove," Heppelmann added. "Server-based systems are good for collecting and storing intellectual property, but not generating it; that's where Groove comes in."
