Pooling in-house IT resources with those of business partners would
mean not only bridging a firewall but also a credibility gap. James
Monroy is based in San Francisco
Intel had chosen the soapbox of its annual showcase to baptise
P2P as the Next Big Thing. The company's CTO Patrick Gelsinger
compared its potential impact to the revolution wrought by Mosaic,
the first browser to tame the World Wide Web. Spurred on by the
controversial popularity of online music distribution platform
Napster, a rising tide of start-ups are hell-bent on exporting P2P
from consumer file sharing applications to corporations.
"Picture all those PCs that lie idle between employee shifts,
working 24 by 7 to crunch your firm's most data-intensive tasks,
maybe stepping in at the flick of a switch or router to ease the
corporate backbone's workload," was Gelsinger's upbeat message.
More radical still, imagine pooling in-house computing resources
across the firewall with those of business partners.
The question is whether CIOs will buy into this brave new world
where standard software can be deployed across multiple PCs and
servers used to pool processing and storage capacity.
Looking past the hyperbole, though, P2P is nothing new. It is
essentially distributed computing for the Internet age. The advent
of a single-protocol globe-girdling network extends the application
of distributed computing beyond projects hitherto limited to single
companies or networked research laboratories.
Exponents may evangelise about the possibilities of bringing
supercomputer-strength processing power within range of peer PCs.
But the ability of the new model to fulfil its potential depends on
how far the industry can guarantee data security and policing of
network access. The management headache of entrusting
mission-critical applications to 2,000 peers at multiple
geographical sites was considerable, admitted Andrew Grimshaw,
chief executive of Applied Meta Computing. His company's P2P
software is being tested by Seattle aerospace giant Boeing.
The peer-to-peer working group has a mandate to troubleshoot
security scalability and management concerns standing in the way of
mass adoption of P2P. But the group has a credibility gap to bridge
before P2P-shy CIOs need to fear the chop.