P2P at work
Setting aside the power struggle over which companies will provide the programming languages and infrastructure, P2P is already proving useful to business. Instant messaging is perhaps the best example of a P2P application that has been rapidly adopted by businesses as a central communications tool. IDC expects the number of corporate users of IM programs to grow from 5.5 million this year to more than 180 million in 2004. But not many people really think of IM as a P2P app.
As it happens, several leading P2P companies began work years before Napster popped up to give the music industry night sweats. "The people who are actually interested in peer-to-peer are providing solutions to problems," Intel's Knighten said. "They don't really care that it's peer-to-peer computing per se."
Groove Networks, which sells a P2P collaboration application, is indicative of this phenomenon. Ray Ozzie, the developer who created Lotus Development's Notes, formed Groove in 1997, inspired by the P2P capabilities he observed in the Doom death matches his teen-age son was playing with his friends over the Internet.
When the company started scouting prospective customers last year, it faced potentially deal-killing resistance from IT people, said Andrew Mahon, Groove's director of strategic marketing. They had heard about P2P in the context of Napster, and were wary about introducing that sort of thing into their networks. They didn't want to lose control.
"The IT folks would come into the meeting with their arms folded," Mahon said. "They'd have seen the research about security and other concerns about peer-to-peer. And that's natural, because the IT guys are the guardians of the infrastructure and they want to be responsive to the organization, but they don't want to wreck the infrastructure for short-term advantages."
Once the Groove salesperson walked them through the authentication and encryption features built into the application, the IT managers stopped worrying and started thinking of how they could use Groove. "We don't consider IT a stumbling block that must be appeased," Mahon said. "We see them as a customer."
Groove has also discovered that P2P alone does not sell a product, unlike the Web technology four or five years ago, which some business managers scrambled madly to adopt, regardless of the business value.
"There isn't a sword hanging over their heads, and their boss saying, 'If you don't get your peer-to-peer strategy in place in the next six months, you're fired,'" Mahon said. "In terms of the marketplace, what we've learned is that if there's no immediately apparent business value, there's no conversation."
Another example of a successful young P2P company is Oculus Technologies, founded in June 1999 with the goal of improving product development processes. Chris Williams, Oculus' president and CEO, said his company ended up using P2P because it was the best way to connect the members of product development teams. Oculus' CO system connects information from disparate desktop applications: For example, it can let a designer link a single piece of data from a computer-aided design program to an Excel spreadsheet on the product manager's desktop.
"Customers are looking for solutions. They don't want to hear that I do peer-to-peer. They want to hear that I solve a problem," Williams said, adding with a chuckle, "We mainly use peer-to-peer when we talk to the media and the financial community."
Oculus' customers include United Technologies and Ford Motor, which is also the privately held company's largest investor.
Other companies with P2P-based products have had success in addressing customers' specific IT needs, often in vertical industry segments. Consilient has been working with BP Amoco to deploy Consilient's Sitelets, portable information containers that move around the network in a P2P manner, to accelerate such business processes as consolidating financial data from BP offices around the world.
WorldStreet has tailored its P2P system to the financial community - again, to solve a very particular information problem. The issue WorldStreet's prospective customers face is this: Analysts are bombarded with hundreds of e-mail messages, without any indication of how critical the information actually is. WorldStreet's plug-in for Microsoft Outlook lets an investment bank's customers, for example, decide what kind of research they want to receive, for which companies and from which financial analysts, among other parameters.
"Relationships aren't static - that's why a portal or Web site doesn't make sense," said Rod Hodgman, WorldStreet's chief operating officer. "What's different about our P2P product is that it's a completely balanced relationship. You can set up profiles to accept only the information you care about. It's information per your specification."
Bear, Stearns & Co. last month started using WorldStreet in a pilot project with about a dozen employees. Stanley Sakellson, the firm's senior managing director of institutional equities, doesn't see WorldStreet's P2P technology as an anarchic force introducing complexity into the network; rather, he sees it as reducing existing data overload problems.
"A typical portfolio manager gets 400 to 500 emails a day," Sakellson said. "What WorldStreet does is filter the information to determine whether something is really pertinent. Machines are speeding the information delivery to people, and it will be machines that filter the information."
