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Vendors groom p-to-p offerings to broaden their overall appeal
AS THE HYPE surrounding peer-to-- peer networking recedes, vendors are surging ahead to deliver p-to-p-- based collaboration applications designed to address enterprise concerns about security, control, and management of distributed systems. Vendors are also exploring links between p-to-p and Web services to extend services to different device types and technologies.
A key advantage enterprises can gain from decentralized computing is the ability to give end-users more control over collaboration setup, tool selection, and management, according to Mike Neuenschwander, senior analyst at the Burton Group, based in Midvale, Utah.
Moreover, p-to-p collaboration gives workers more direct access to information resources, said Jarad Carleton, program leader for Internet infrastructure at Frost and Sullivan, in San Jose, Calif.
"Peer-to-peer gets [enterprises] out of a hierarchical structure and allows people to get at the information they need directly, and that can be directly from someone else's computer," Carleton said.
However, p-to-p collaboration faces an uphill battle for mind-share within the enterprise, with images of bandwidth-hogging Napster so closely associated.
But some vendors, such as Groove Networks, are helping p-to-p gain acceptance by giving network administrators...