Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Whatever happened to peer-to-peer?

October 29, 2004 | Comments: (0)

Whatever happened to peer-to-peer?

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I remember several years back when peer-to-peer technologies were all the rage.

Many start-ups eagerly claimed the P2P label, whether or not the architecture truly was peer-to-peer. I wrote tons of articles about P2P ventures-- each hoping to be the Napster for enterprise IT-- that have since come and gone. And I recall the shift, after the dot-com bomb, when P2P based companies wanted to distance themselves from that label and all other start-up buzzwords.

But, today, a few of those early P2P kids are still kicking. Earlier this week Editor in Chief Steve Fox and I met with a few folks from Kontiki, one of those early P2P companies.

Kontiki makes software that can speed the delivery of video, large files, software, and other content over existing networks. Rather than relying on central servers or expensive hardware additions, Kontiki's Delivery Management System uses a company's idle PCs and other existing hardware to deliver huge files and video, which can choke a network. Essentially, it is a peer-to-peer architecture, and I remember when Kontiki was a little friendlier to the P2P tag. But now the company calls it "grid delivery," but it still is same idea of using otherwise idle network resources, such as PCs or servers, to create a network of peers. Typically slow files such as a large video file, can be delivered faster with Kontiki's DMS because the requested content is pushed out to the user not only from the original server, but also from networked PCs that have copies of the content.

Kontiki is continuing where others have stumbled. And most of what I've heard and seen says that rich media and video are going to keep growing in the enterprise. I'm not sure of their total number of customers, but some of the referenceable names include Ernst & Young, CNet, Adobe, and Palm.

Groove Networks is another one that is still thriving. NextPage, which at one time applied P2P to content and document management, is still around. The company's publishing applications business unit was acquired last month by Fast Search & Transfer. Who else has survived?

Posted by Cathleen Moore on October 29, 2004 03:51 PM

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