Intelligent Enterprise

Peer-to-Peer Pressure

Competing P2P and distributed computing technologies race to gain market share

Napster's rise and fall has garnered much attention recently, but the interest in peer-to-peer (P2P) processing has only received a minor setback. Harnessing the CPU power among networked computers, although not new, offers a potential solution for organizations facing burgeoning user demands for collaboration and resources. A variety of companies are racing to become the dominant P2P solution.

In February 2001, Sun Microsystems revealed P2P-based software called Jxta (pronounced "juxta") at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference in San Francisco. The intention of Jxta is to provide a bridge for separate P2P applications and link computing tasks across a P2P network.

CNET News.com reports that Bill Joy, Sun's chief scientist, has no desire to dominate the fledgling P2P technology. But the consequences of Sun's unsuccessful attempts to enlist the open-source community for Java and Jini deployments play a definite factor in Sun's decision to make Jxta open source ("Sun Enlists Peer-to-Peer in War Against Microsoft," CNET News.com, February 15, 2001).

Competitive Advantage. Many analysts tout this latest Sun effort as a threat to Microsoft's overly complex and unclear .Net initiative. The mission of Microsoft's .Net is to allow the creation of distributed Web services that integrate and collaborate with a range of complementary services. Although Microsoft has not yet released any P2P solutions, its goal is to be the dominant force in making information available any time, any place, and on any device.

Intel is also moving into P2P with its Peer-to-Peer Working Group. But this effort initially suffered much criticism. The inaugural meeting of the group left many attendees denouncing Intel's efforts as proprietary and self-serving, and Intel has subsequently backed away from a major role.

Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes, illustrates another benefit to P2P. His new company, Groove Networks Inc., recently revealed Groove, a P2P application based on the XML data exchange standard for realtime collaboration.

Called "Napster for business," (David Kirkpatrick, "Software's Humble Wizard Does It Again," Fortune, February 19, 2001) the software has already garnered interest from companies such as General Electric and Intel for use in their Web-based supply chain projects, and from SAP for modules that incorporate data from enterprise software systems into a Groove session. Ozzie foresees Groove in every aspect of business.

Managing P2P. But as these P2P architectures become more complex, the need to manage distributed resources escalates. A group of companies, including Platform Computing Corp., Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and Silicon Graphics Inc., recently formed the New Productivity Initiative (NPI) with the goal of creating an industry standard for distributed resource management (DRM).

The NPI standard will provide a way for DRM to target all computers from data center servers to desktops, run all types of applications, differentiate computers by their resources, and schedule resources to meet demand, with higher priority work processed first. (The group plans to offer up their work to open standards bodies.)

According to Dr. Andrew Chien, CTO of Entropia Inc., "Not all peer-to-peer applications require distributed resource management [for example, Napster's model], but many do." Chien added that P2P largely focuses on the desktop, but if you ask companies like Sun and Microsoft, it also includes server-to-server connections. "The space is not clear," Chien said. Like several companies, Entropia representatives attended both the Intel Peer-to-Peer and NPI meetings.

Meta Group, in a special to CNET News.com (November 9, 2000), points to the fact that "a highly networked, parallel processing environment is rarely suitable for traditional, general-purpose computing." Instead, distributed computing can provide a cheap alternative to super computers - needed by human genome researchers and designers of automotive parts and chips. Meta Group also points out that designing DRM for heterogeneous environments, without emphasizing a proprietary system, will be challenging.

But Dr. Songnian Zhou, CEO of Platform Computing, which provides distributed computing software, disagrees. He believes that future DRM adopters will include companies that perform financial evaluations and business intelligence in the same way that the Internet moved from universities to corporations. Systems, such as ERP systems, generate a lot of data, and clients want to connect to SAP and Siebel applications. He believes that DRM has the potential to intelligently balance these demands and resources.

Balancing the conflict between strategically positioning a company's product within a technology by influencing a standard and encouraging new development for that technology's growth has long been a tough hurdle. Which technology will dominate - if any - remains to be seen.

Michelle Nichols