Peer-to-Peer: It is all in the application, according to Yankee Group ReportBoston 07 June 2001 A Report from the Yankee Group, "Peer-to-Peer: An Old Idea Becomes Revolutionary," finds that while many peer-to-peer (P2P) start-ups are struggling to find a business model that works, the P2P market is evolving into four primary market segments: resource aggregators, "people-to-people" collaboration tools, applications based on P2P architectures, and infrastructure tools upon which developers can build P2P applications. All these segments have radically different characteristics and business models, and their futures vary greatly.
According to Neal Goldman, director of the Yankee Group's Internet Computing
Strategies research and consulting practice, "Napster has seriously disrupted
the music distribution business and has caused a huge resurgence of interest in
peer-to-peer computing. While not a new technology concept, the Internet
provides a ubiquitous data dialtone that enables end users to connect directly
with their peers without the intervention of IT or intermediary servers."
Goldman adds, "P2P technology is causing the Internet community to change its
focus from pure Web-based applications to those that connect directly over
protocols other than HTTP."
In this Report, the Yankee Group defines the basics of peer-to-peer technology,
details early entrants into the market, and analyzes the opportunities for
market evolution. The Yankee Group believes that P2P represents a dramatic shift
of the Internet landscape away from the last five years' hyperfocus on the World
Wide Web. Peer-to-peer will permeate the enterprise as well as consumer
applications, and portends an increased concentration on distributed
applications and "edge computing." The Yankee Group also believes that
ultimately the P2P companies that will win will be those that recognize that
it's not about the architecture--it's about the applications on top of the
architecture.
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