P2P beginning to make its corporate play

More than a year after the peak in hype about peer-to-peer networking, the technology is breaking away from its ugly association with Napster and starting to find a foothold in corporate applications.

Early adopters are starting to focus less on the technology and more on the software created with it, most notably collaboration and content-management products.

Peer-to-peer in its purest form involves two client PCs talking to one another without a server in the middle. Hybrid forms of peer-to-peer use a server as a sort of directory for clients to find one another.

P2P advancements

But IT executives are still cautious over lingering infrastructure peer-to-peer issues related to security, management, performance, privacy, interoperability and standards.

With some 300 vendors now touting peer-to-peer as an architectural underpinning, there is need for caution. But vendors such as Groove Networks, NextPage, Endeavors, Oculus , LiquidNet and WorldStreet are trying to ease customer fears with their products. Converts are being found in military and government circles, in the financial industry, and in publishing and consulting.

"I don't care if the technology is rubber bands and bailing wire or peer-to-peer, the beauty of what we do [with peer-to-peer technology] is being able to manage relationships and data," says Rob Norton, vice president of Delaware Investments, a Philadelphia investment management firm. Norton uses WorldStreet Net, a collaborative application for the financial industry that creates a "web of trust" between peers. For Delaware Investments, those peers are Wall Street research firms.

WorldStreet's Package Router lets Norton filter out the information he wants and have it delivered through a host of standard applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Office, specialized financial applications and even mobile devices. It's a peer-to-peer, publish-and-subscribe model.

"You're extending your network, so that raises a lot of security concerns with us, but WorldStreet has satisfied those concerns," Norton says. "We are better able to establish contacts with people we know and trust and that we want information from."

That is a 180-degree turn from many commercial peer-to-peer applications that allow sharing between any peers on a network. That model has already been rejected in the enterprise.

"IT needs to take a nonjudgmental, nonhistorical view of peer-to-peer and understand what is coming," says Mike Neuenschwander, an analyst with The Burton Group and the author of the consultancy's recent report "Commercial Peer-to-Peer: Alternative Architectures for E-Business Networks."

Neuenschwander says there are "a lot of things to learn from peer-to-peer engineering that can be added into products. The e-mail you receive could include a URL that would pull an attachment off the hard drive of the sender instead of having to store that in your e-mail system."

Grafting peer-to-peer onto current products is leading some to explore the technology not as a replacement, but as an extension.

Groove Networks this month will introduce its BOT Architecture, which lets users bring back-end systems into the peering relationship. The company's Groove product lets peers share data and applications.

John Wollman, senior vice president of Alliance Consulting Group, is using BOT agents to build a training application that teaches people how to use Groove. The BOT agents grab the training material from a database, create a Groove shared space, and take the user on a guided instructional tour of Groove.

"The BOT [agent] acts like a person," Wollman says. It also can invite in other participants to answer any question the trainee has.

While these early adopters are pushing the envelope, they are still outnumbered by skeptics. Wollman says Alliance has no plans to use peer-to-peer to replace its content-management systems.

Others say the technology is mostly unproven and therefore not an option.

"We are testing all sorts of collaboration technology, but we are not testing peer-to-peer," says Norma Closs, vice president and division manager of Wilmington Trust. "To maintain our trust status we have to have the most up-to-date security. We are regulated."

Wilmington Trust runs a Web-based collaboration product called eRoom to share documents with customers involved in closings, proposals and bankruptcy.

Others voice concerns about scalability of complex webs of peers, security, privacy and management.

Vendors such as Groove, WorldStreet and NextPage, which develops a content management product, have tools to manage deployments and users. All address security with encryption. Endeavors Technology develops a document-sharing product called Magi that uses key pairs based on X.509 certificates for secure authentication and has built an access-control feature based on "buddy lists" between peers.

"The enterprise hurdles don't seem to be the technology, they are cultural and based on perception," says Robert Hegarty, an analyst with The Tower Group. He says most of the perception is based on the open playing field deployed by Napster.

But another pressing issue is interoperability. No peer-to-peer products work together in a standard way.

Standards efforts are under way from Sun with its JXTA project, a set of open source peer-to-peer protocols, and the Peer-to-Peer Working Group, started a year ago by Intel. Both efforts, however, have a long way to go and will not influence the industry in the short term, experts say.

But some think the standards may come from a different source - Web services. The Web services model is about standards-based integration of enterprise systems.

"The differences between peer-to-peer and Web services at the architectural level is fairly trivial," says Clay Shirky, a writer and consultant who will deliver the opening keynote at The O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference on Sept. 18 in Washington, D.C. "So far, peer-to-peer hasn't made any assumptions about standards, unlike Web services, which is all about standards-based interoperability."

Shirky says peer-to-peer standards may very well "piggyback" on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and other Web services standards. SOAP is an XML-based mechanism that allows computers to exchange messages and use each other's services.

If that is the case, companies beginning to build Web services architectures around products from Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and others may be laying the foundation for peer-to-peer adoption.

But until then, corporate users will have to keep on their toes.

"The enterprise needs to understand where the choke points remain in the technology or they may get into some things that they will regret," says Tim O'Reilly, founder of publisher and conference planner O'Reilly and Associates.

P2P beginning to make its corporate play

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