Stop fretting. P2P is about a lot more than the chaos of Napster and your teenager's ripped-off Metallica hits. Although the music-sharing, recording-industry-provoking service certainly helped to shine the spotlight on this powerful networking technology, growing numbers of enterprises believe the technology can be harnessed to solve real problems faced by real businesses. While P2P is still a long way from becoming a mainstream enterprise technology, some major financial services and business-to-business e-commerce companies are becoming believers.
It's not hard to see the attractions. Using P2P networkingâ€"which, in its simplest form, means that computers on the Internet talk to one another rather than filtering their conversations through the bottleneck of a serverâ€"means that the PC power on the edges of the Internet that has been skyrocketing over the last few years can finally be harnessed.
Not only do some enterprises believe P2P can allow them to access bucket loads of unused computing power, but they also believe they will be able to use that power to revolutionise a score of enterprise processes. One such process is real-time collaboration. Financial services provider American Century Investments is putting that idea to the test with a prototype of WorldStreet's P2P-enabled Net platform.
Other enterprises believe P2P may be a boon for aggregating information from all over the Internet. American Century is eyeing that idea, as are officials at B2B companies who say they believe that P2P may revitalise what experts have been calling the failed promise of online exchanges. By and large, e-marketplaces haven't proved capable of handling complex business transactions or of replacing the human relationships that still form the basis of business relationships. P2P, experts say, could help, due to its ability to capture bandwidth-intensive forms of communication such as telephone conversations and aggre gate them with other forms of content. And officials at e-marketplaces such as Renovotech.com hope to capitalize on the technology's real-time data aggregation for competitive advantage.
There are at least two more places where P2P makes sense in an enterprise setting, experts say. The first is automatic software distribution. One company, myCIO.com, is already using P2P in its Rumor anti-virus definition distribution software offers. Another logical P2P fit is real-time, close-to-the-end-user performance testing and monitoring of Web sites, as is being rolled out by Envive.
