The appeal of the peer
Renovotech.com, run by Renovo Group, embraced P2P when its site went live with AgentWare's Syndicator platform early this month. Officials at the e-marketplace for refurbished IT hardware say they believe that the technology will not only provide customers with real-time aggregated data but will also save the exchange a hefty investment in infrastructure, since P2P shifts the horsepower required for aggregation processing off to peers in the exchange's network.
CEO Scott Kruglewicz wasn't looking to be at the forefront of a P2P revolution. Kruglewicz was merely looking to alleviate a big data-storage headache without going brokeâ€"something P2P delivered.
"It shifts the need for horsepower for computing power to the client and off the servers," Kruglewicz said. "We have a few servers that run the technology, but we don't need [the servers that would be required for] that massive storage."
Forgoing those storage and processing serversâ€"not to mention the labor to support themâ€"racks up huge savings. Kruglewicz wouldn't pin down a figure, but he did go so far as to say that adopting a P2P architecture would shave infrastructure costs somewhere in the "high six figures, if not seven."
Renovotech.com's customers are midrange to high-end IT resellers that refurbish, recondition and sell used, high-end technology hardware. Typically, those resellers spend their days searching for raw-material listings. For them, visibility into what's available and at what price across the Internet and across the globe is manna. Of course, fresh manna is better than stale.
Unfortunately, current aggregation processes don't serve up the freshest data possible. The way that aggregationâ€"pulling information off the Web and redistributing itâ€"happens in most B2B processes is that a server searches for and collects data on a predetermined schedule and in a set format. Information is then drawn back into an auction aggregation tool. For example, an auction aggregator may select 15 sites to scan. The aggregator may set up its system to ping the sites hourly. The aggregator then republishes the information to requesting end users.
The problem with this process is that with many B2B online transactions, such as auctions, timing is crucial. As such, jumping that 1-hour lag time becomes a competitive victory. That's where P2P comes in.
Using AgentWare's Syndicator process, peersâ€"which can be site-hosting servers or merely client systemsâ€"are given a set of instructions to gather information from servers continuously.
The information requested isn't stored on Renovotech.com servers. Rather, a syndication packet is sent to the reseller that includes a blueprint of where on the network the information is stored, a reformatted version of the information, along with instructions on what to do with the information when it's receivedâ€"and the packet is smart enough to know on what type of device it will be rendered on, to boot.
