By Ann Harrison
Network World, 09/24/01

At the height of Napster's success, more than 70 million people around the world discovered peer-to-peer networking - the ability to transfer data directly from one computer to another without a central server.

The Napster buzz has come and gone, but peer-to-peer remains. Instead of college kids exchanging all manner of music, now it's business users exploring the technology to boost productivity.

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Vendors are offering tools that let a group of users collaborate and swap information in a shared virtual workspace, perhaps even one that spans business partners. Most promising are distributed peer-to-peer systems that let users pool spare computing power on networked PCs for compute-intensive tasks, thus avoiding expensive hardware upgrades.

 Many start-ups are trying to cash in on this latest peer-to-peer craze, with the most interesting work coming from those developing frameworks for peer-to-peer applications. These create a standardized, secure platform for corporate file-swapping. Vendors include Groove Networks, Parabon Computation, IT Factory, Commerce One, World Street and Sun, with its JXTA initiative. Intel is also creating new infrastructures to support peer-to-peer applications and is one of the founding members of the Peer-to-Peer Working Group, which seeks to set standards for these technologies.

To be sure, there are issues for such groups to address.

"The biggest problem is security," says Solomon Smith Barney analyst John Gravitt. "The second biggest problem is trust and getting companies to change their business processes to allow each to see the other's information. The challenge is to make companies understand that by sharing this information, they will get something out of it."

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Applications and issues

British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKlein is one of the first, large companies to explore peer-to-peer applications that support collaboration.

Bill Wood, director of collaborative computing research for the firm, says there is no shortage of ideas for how to employ the Groove technology. The company's legal team wants to review and edit legal documents with partners. The IT department sees Groove as a contained environment to test software. And the company's operations staff wants to share information with outside contractors and vendors involved in the construction of a new building.

"Anywhere a team needs to work on documents together, it's pretty awesome," Wood says.

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What to ask P2P vendors: If your P2P product performs collaboration, how does it authenticate users and ensure the security of documents? Does your product integrate with Microsoft Office products, or when will that support be available? How does your product support customized business rules and policies?

But the early feedback from business users suggests that commercial peer-to-peer applications need frameworks that support central authentication and auditing of collaborative spaces. Wood is concerned about users unwittingly downloading software to the Groove environment that opens security holes in the company's network.

To prevent this, Groove encrypts all data in transit and in shared spaces. Additionally, software downloaded into a Groove shared space is digitally signed by its author and validated by Groove to ensure it has not been modified.

That doesn't entirely appease Wood. "[The signing technology] is not perfect. You still have to trust the people who are signing," he says. "We worry about people loading a nifty looking Groove tool that looks like it does something useful but actually sends all your files to a hacker," he says.

On top of that, Groove's application development environment is "raw," Wood says. He'd also like to be able to integrate Groove with Microsoft's NetMeeting software through the company's firewall and to edit Microsoft Word documents in real time, instead of waiting for Groove's relay service to send updated versions of documents.

Andrew Mahon, director of strategic marketing for Groove, agrees that integrating the next generation of Groove with Microsoft Office tools is "a make or break thing" for the company. He vowed that Groove will act on that belief, but would not specify a release date.

P2P

Scalability is another issue. Groove can only handle 20 users in the same shared space, analyst Gravitt says, a number that will have to climb before the technology is widely accepted.

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Sharing files and stealing cycles

Other peer-to-peer companies focus more on letting users trade files with one another, an application that comes with its own set of requirements. One example is WorldStreet Net, a Java-based peer-to-peer system that helps financial companies prioritize, sort and exchange business information. Stock traders can use the system to create a dossier of information about a company and ship it to clients, for example.

In such an application, customers must be able to apply their own business rules and policies to file trading, says Bob Lamoureux, CTO of Boston firm WorldStreet. Financial services firms need to record file exchanges and audit them to ensure employees are not violating company or government rules regarding security trading.

The most successful of the new peer-to-peer players, however, are likely to be those that let users pool unused computer cycles. Not only to do these vendors solve a concrete business problem, but they also have more successfully addressed scalability and security issues, the latter mainly by encrypting data in transit and wherever it is stored.

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Is your application suitable for P2P? Tasks that peer-to-peer handles best:   Distributed searches.     File transfers.   Collaborative document editing.   Software testing.   Cycle sharing.   Distributed storage.   Logging and auditing of   collaborative exchanges.

Parabon, of Fairfax, Va., is one example. Its Pioneer client software has been downloaded by 33,000 users, many of whom donate their machine-time to Parabon clients, several of which conduct cancer research. Other participants are encouraged to give machine-time through incentives such as cash sweepstakes. Parabon clients pay the company for access to its distributed network.

Dean Pesnell, a scientist at NASA contractor Nomad Research of Bowie, Md., is testing the Parabon network for quantum mechanical simulations, complex calculations that took six weeks on a NASA computer. Two similar simulations he's conducted so far on the Parbon network each took about one hour.

"I'm trying to get some interest [in Parabon] at NASA instead of buying a lot of computers you just have to replace next year," Pesnell says.

Collaboration, file swapping and cycle sharing may seem too diverse to remain leashed by a single buzz word, P2P, for long. Still, this simplest of all network designs is growing up and has become worth watching again.

Harrison is a San Francisco science and technology reporter. She can be reached at ah@well.com.

Related links:

Other Signature Series editions

Network World File Sharing Newsletter

P2P beginning to make its corporate play Network World, 09/10/01

Sun makes its peer-to-peer bid Network World, 06/11/01

Enterprise P2P networking is hot Network World File Sharing Newsletter, 08/29/01

P2P comes out of Napster's shadow Network World File Sharing Newsletter, 08/15/01

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