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Have you been wondering what to do with all the processing power, surplus hard disk space, and high-speed Internet connections you've built up over the past few years? Take a clue from Napster. The renegade MP3-swapping site may be on the ropes, but the technology it uses--peer-to-peer networking--is all the rage.

In a peer-to-peer network, powerful client PCs take on the role of servers, enabling direct communication among systems that stands to lower IT costs and raise corporate productivity. In this month's Enterprise Technology, we explore nascent peer-to-peer solutions for corporate networks. Are they any better than current client/server applications?

If you think Napster has been a boon only to music buffs and copyright lawyers, think again. Sure, the rise and fall of the MP3-sharing Web site spotlighted important issues of intellectual property and copyright law. But it also demonstrated the power of peer-to-peer networking, an architecture that could transform enterprise computing and help your company lower costs and improve productivity.

If that sounds far-fetched, consider the problem that Shawn Fanning faced when, as a music-starved college student, he sat down to create Napster. Fanning knew that millions of people scattered around the world had MP3 files sitting on their hard disks. He wanted to help them share that music, but he knew it would be impractical to collect all the MP3s on a central server. Never mind the cost and the copyright obstacles; the sheer size of all those files--and the constant demand for uploads and downloads--made physical centralizing impossible.

Instead, Fanning turned to peer-to-peer networking. The files stay where they are--on individual hard drives. Napster simply maintains a central list of who has what and, when a user requests a song, puts the user in touch with the source to exchange the MP3 directly.

Scratch out "MP3" and substitute "corporate data," and you begin to see why peer-to-peer networking has suddenly become one of the hottest topics in enterprise computing.

"There is a lot of hype surrounding peer-to-peer computing that may overstate its importance," says Tim O'Reilly, president of O'Reilly & Associates, a Sebastapol, California-based research and publishing firm that has been examining leading-edge technology since 1978. "But that doesn't change the fact that every business will be using a form of peer-to-peer computing at some point. The only questions are, how soon and how extensively?"

Clearly, peer-to-peer networking has the potential to lower costs and raise productivity by redefining traditional network structures. But to change the way corporations do business, peer-to-peer solutions must demonstrate a clear advantage over traditional solutions, which only a few have managed to do so far.

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