P2P in Business

With the rise of Cloud (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) centralization of business application is taking place which certainly offers its own benefits but also introduces single point of failure and too much control by very few entities. Centralization also asks for non interrupted connectivity which may not be feasible in lot of scenarios.

At the same time increasing interdependency of workers and businesses requires networked individuals and resources. In few of such scenarios networks get created on adhoc basis for short duration of project.
To solve these opposing requirements, P2P networks can be of great help. P2P does not require very centralized systems and divide the data ownership and infrastructure needs among participants.
Keeping this paradigm, I looked into various products and platforms and surprised to find that lot of small and big enterprises are using P2P technology and platforms in their business applications. One Further investigation revealed that the biggest share is cornered by BitTorrent.

1. Aggregator Juice (http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/index.php) uses BitTorrent
2. Video Player Miro (http://www.getmiro.com) uses BitTorrent
3. Music Retailer DGM Live (http://www.dgmlive.com) distributes using BitTorrent
4. Music Retailer Sub Pop (http://www.subpop.com) uses BitTorrent for distribution
5. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (http://www.cbc.ca), Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (http://www.nrk.no) and VPRO (http://www.vpro.nl) have often distributed their content using BitTorrent.
6. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is equipped with built-in BitTorrent support.
7. Blizzard Entertainment (http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/) uses BitTorrent (using a proprietary client "Blizzard Downloader") to distribute most content for StarCraft II and World of Warcraft, including the games.
8. Entropia Universe (http://www.entropiauniverse.com/) distributes files through BitTorrent
9. Facebook (http://facebook.com) and Twitter (http://twitter.com) use BitTorrent to distribute updates to servers.
10. CRM Ajatus (http://www.ajatus.info) is built on top of CouchDb
11. Bug Traking system SimpleDefects(http://syncwith.us/) is built using Distributed database Prophet
12. Avvenu (http://www.avvenu.com/) is a Personal File Sharing, Mobile Sharing platform. It is acquird by Nokia.
13. Dekoh (http://dekoh.com) facilitates Personal File Sharing with Web Integration platform
14. ShareDirect (http://www.laplink.com/business_solutions/sharedirect.html) is data synchronization tool by LapLink
15. Pando (http://www.pando.com) by Pando is Publishing, Media Streaming, and file sharing solution
16. StreamerP2P (http://www.streamerp2p.com) is a Broadcasting solution over internet
17. Syncura (http://www.syncura.com) has few products for document sharing and collaboration
18. Digital Media Delivery framework by Velocix (http://www.velocix.com) uses P2P paradigm
19. The Digital Media Exchange (DMX - http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/media/projects/dmx) operated by Harvard Law School
20. Social VPN (http://socialvpn.wordpress.com) is a P2P based VPN platform

Some of the Peer to Peer Initiatives:

1. JXTA (https://jxta.dev.java.net) is P2P Networking initiative by Java
2. P2P-Next (http://www.p2p-next.org) is open source initiative which primarily focuses on digital media.
3. Secure P2P Framework (SePP - http://sourceforge.net/projects/securep2p) focuses on security aspects of P2P. It is developed in java.
4. GNUnet (https://gnunet.org) is one more P2P Framework which focuses on security.
5. AntHill (http://www.cs.unibo.it/projects/anthill) is based on Complex Adaptive System paradigm.
6. MsgConnect (http://www.eldos.com/msgconnect) is proprietary P2P framework offered by Eldos.
7. Brunet (http://boykin.acis.ufl.edu/wiki/index.php/Brunet) is P2P library written in C#

Some of the P2P frameworks for developing business applications:


• Apache CouchDb (http://couchdb.apache.org) is a RESTful object database
• DBE (http://swallow.sourceforge.net) is a Java based P2P container for service oriented architecture
• Prophet (http://syncwith.us) is a P2P-replicated database
• Friend to Friend (F2F - http://ulno.net/f2f) is a Java framework for building P2P business applications using the SIP protocol
• Telepathy Tubes (http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Tubes) is a framework to channel application information over instant messaging networks
• BitTottent (http://www.bittorrent.com) is one of the most popular P2P framework to develop enterprise grade applications.