P2P Still Waiting To Get It's Groove On

Napster, the P2P file sharing technology that enabled anyone with a Web-connected PC to download free music, had taken the world by storm, scaring the music business half to death.

The beauty of P2P applications, including the wildly popular instant messaging, was the freedom they gave people to communicate and collaborate with each other one-on-one. Groove Networks led the vanguard, promising to bolster P2P collaboration with security and manageability to make it palatable to corporate IT departments. In the days of the heady Net boom, many corporate customers were wowed by the possibilities of online, near-realtime collaboration.

But then the boom went bust, and aside from a few well-publicized takers,Groove touts a GlaxoSmithkline implementation, for example,corporate P2P use has been relegated to the back of the line, appearing only in pockets, and often in the form of unauthorized instant messaging.

"There's been very little take-up [of P2P among financial services companies because of the economy," said Rob Hagerty, an analyst at Tower Group. "IT spending has contracted so that investments in technology that are not absolutely proven are gone."

Yet Groove founder and CEO Ray Ozzie sees reason for cautious optimism. "Could the numbers be better? Absolutely. [But we're making steady progress, and we're closing business," he said. Like other vendors, Groove is pitching P2P solutions more to line-of-business units than to central IT departments.

Integrators said P2P still interests enlightened buyers but has to prove itself in advance of any sale. "There's the standard IT fear of the unknown, the unproven,worries about bandwidth, performance, security," said John Wollman, executive vice president of Alliance Consulting, Philadelphia. "It's not a whole lot different than what you heard in the beginning of the Web era."

On the plus side, businesspeople who brought instant messaging to work from home have paved the way for P2P acceptance, Wollman said. Once folks see what can be done with AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft instant messaging, they can envision what those applications,combined with discussion threads, application sharing and white-boarding,can bring to the table, he said.

Instead of an instant messaging thread evaporating with a computer crash or log-off, those discussions could be archived and stored,an important consideration now that the government, under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, has mandated better monitoring of corporate communications at publicly traded companies.

And it's those possibilities that companies such as Groove are watching. Groove, founded five years ago, launched its first product four years later. Since then, Microsoft has bought a $51 million stake in the company, which in itself validates P2P technology and Ozzie's vision.

Advanced Reality, a Houston startup, is layering collaboration directly on top of popular Microsoft applications. Already, the company created Presence-AR adapters for Excel and PowerPoint, and this week it plans to tweak its Excel adapter to work with Sharepoint Portal Server to ease document collaboration. "[Advanced Reality is taking a one-step-at-a-time approach, piggy-backing on existing applications, which makes sense," said Dana Gardner, research director at Aberdeen Group.

"The problem with document management systems is that the process is stopped during check-in and check-out. Only one person has access to that document," said Derek Ruths, founder and CTO of Advanced Reality, whose products will enable workgroups to share access to documents, he said

Meanwhile, solution providers say P2P is in a chicken-and-egg situation. "This is novel technology. There's never been anything like it, so these vendors need reference accounts to show how this stuff works," said Ed Metzler, president of aCCredo, Portland, Ore. Given today's business climate, nobody wants to go with a solution unless its value is proven up front, he said.