(这条文章已经被阅读了 72 次) 时间：2001-01-12 02:18:43 来源：张宏 (茶馆主人) 转载
Napster and wireless devices are two consumer technologies starting to get bigger play in front of a business audience.
What do these technologies have in common, aside from hype? They’re both emerging fields for resellers.
Napster, famous for its Internet musicsharing application, has raised the profile of peer-to-peer computing (P2P). While not a pure form of P2P – where data is processed and transmitted without an intermediary server – industry observers say Napster exemplifies P2P in the sense that its application allows users to roam the Internet, find and swap files.
Intel’s P2P working group, announced in August at Intel’s San Jose, Calif.-based developer forum, are finding companies turning out in droves to ensure widespread adoption of P2P computing.
Patrick Gelsinger, Intel’s vice-president and CTO of the architecture group, says P2P computing will spark the next wave of Internet applications much like the Web did in the past.
“While the most visible impact of this model has been in consumer environments, peer-to-peer computing has the potential to play a major role in business computing as well,” he told forum attendees. “By adding peer-to-peer capabilities, corporations can tap into existing teraflops of performance and terabytes of storage to make today’s applications more efficient and enable entirely new applications in the future.” A new Forrester Research report, P2P: Pushing Computing Power To The Edge, agrees that P2P computing can go a lot further than Napster.
Possible business applications include collaboration, distributed computing, file serving, edge services and intelligent agents.
The report’s author, Cambridge, Mass.based analyst Simon Yates, says there are many vendors who have recently been designing new P2P products “in stealth mode.” One of those software developers is Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes.
Ozzie has gone on to found P2P company Groove Networks Inc. of Beverly, Mass. Today he’s scouting out new ways to prove his recently announced collaboration software really works.
“Once he has the application on everyone’s desktop, then he can go to the software vendors – Microsoft or anyone else – and say, ‘I have one million people who use my Groove application to do peer-topeer right now. Won’t you make a version of your software that we can plug right into it?”‘ suggests Yates.
Yates concedes P2P platform developers, including Groove Networks, Aimster, Centrata, United Devices, Mojo Nation, DataSynapse and CenterSpan, are working in a very “immature market.” “Most of (these companies) barely have any kind of funding whatsoever, so they’re all running out to venture capitalists trying to grab money and then they have to go out and sell a product and then they have to actually generate revenue,” he says. “There’s a long way to go before this technology is really something that companies are going to be implementing on a large scale,” says Yates.
But companies will adopt P2P on a large scale very soon, he says, adding it may be adopted in as little as two or three years.
After that, says Yates, “it’ll hit more like hyper-growth numbers.” Intel does have something to gain from this technology, according to Yates.
“They want us to keep buying PCs with powerful processors in them and lots of memory and things like that – all of the bits and pieces they provide,” says Yates. “The more peer-to-peer takes off, the more of those kinds of chips that are going to be needed.” One market expected to reap great potential is financial services. Such companies processing extremely number-intensive calculations require a great deal of computing power. Under a P2P model, instead of having to buy high-end computers, the financial firms would be able to use computers they’ve already got at different offices around the world.
Peer-to-peer history While Napster made it famous, peer-to-peer computing technology has been around for some time.
In definitive terms Napster is slightly different from pure P2P computing. Napster tracks down MP3s, from different desktop computers, for everyone to share across the Internet. A server offers a central directory. In pure P2P, according to Forrester Research, there is no single server controlling the sharing – there’s only a direct connection between PCs.
One of the most well-known pure P2P business applications is Intel’s NetBatch.
Instead of buying a massively powerful super-computer to do complex modelling for semiconductor design, Intel created a technology that allowed its employees to take advantage of the company’s existing PCs.
For example, when Intel’s Israeli employees go home at the end of the day, employees in California can access the Israeli computers and take advantage of their number-crunching power.
In 10 years, estimates Intel spokesperson Manny Vara, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker saved US$500 million.
Another example is the SETI@Home project, run by the University of California at Berkeley, which allows amateur searchers of extraterrestrial intelligence to scour radio telescope data and share findings.
Launched in May 1999, the project aimed to hook up the spare computer time of 150,000 users.
At present, it has more than 1.6 million users, with more than 500,000 active at any time.
Reseller challenges and opportunities For value-added resellers and system integrators, the P2P model could easily create a service-revenue stream. Applications would have to be built and integration into existing systems would take place.
“If you’re a company like Intel, you’ve got a bunch of networks, PCs, lots of servers and things dedicated to storage,” says Yates. “Someone is going to have to integrate all that stuff in with P2P applications.” But according to his report, P2P still “needs to do a lot of growing up before IT managers will rally around it.” One of the greatest challenges that lie ahead for this technology is proving itself – particularly in the area of security.
P2P vendors have to take the next step of convincing IT managers this is a technology that is useful to employees and not a threat to security.
In today’s P2P model, Yates says, users circumvent the server and there is little control over who is coming in or out of the network to access the computers. That’s also the problem for IT managers.
“IT managers love, or require a centralized control of things,” says Yates. “Everything comes in and comes out of one single point so they can keep track of it and make sure there’s nothing disruptive.
“An IT manager is going to look to whoever their trusted security vendors are – whether it’s VeriSign (based in Mountain View, Calif.) or Entrust (headquartered in Plano, Tex.) – to partner with these or provide products to these P2P vendors so that IT managers can trust where they come from,” he says.
Standardization is going to be a big issue, adds Vara, who notes developers could create many flavours of P2P that wouldn’t talk to each other.
Until the issues are resolved, he says, VARs can monitor the technology’s emergence and look forward to working with corporate applications in two years.
Wireless technologies come in for a landing Another emerging technology is wireless computing, which is generating a huge amount of industry buzz.
And for good reason, say analysts, particularly in the area of mobile commerce (as opposed to PC-based e-commerce).
In Canada, Toronto-based research group IDC reports there are now more than eight million wireless subscribers of either wireless phones or handheld computers. By 2004, that number is expected to leap to 20 million.
With the purchasing power of wireless subscribers now at hand, non-PC devices are expected to close nearly US$23 billion in online sales, and they will influence another US$128 billion in offline sales, says Forrester Research.
These are numbers the computer industry can ill afford to ignore.
On a worldwide basis, mobile phone penetration already exceeds PC penetration.
Joe Manget, Toronto-based vice-president of The Boston Consulting Group, says many Canadian companies are currently investigating m-commerce strategies.
“In particular,” he says, “Canada’s financial services institutions have become global leaders through their aggressive move to deploy basic banking services on wireless platforms. Efforts are also underway to enable wireless brokerage transactions leading to broader m-commerce capabilities.” Canadian banks including the Bank of Montreal, TD Bank and National Bank of Canada offer a variety of wireless services.
Many mobile phones now feature banking Web sites, as well as a menu of pre-selected shopping sites.
To date, only a few phones let users enter URLs.
Handheld devices, while making up less of the wireless subscriber pie, are also taking steps to offer broader services in this area.
And through partners including Longueuil, Que.-based PCS Innovations, Toronto-based 724 Solutions Inc. and Richmond Hill, Ont.-based Wysdom Inc., among others, a growing number of Canadian businesses are setting up services for the wireless world.
Given the high level of consumer acceptance, the Boston Consulting Group predicts by 2003, m-commerce will be where the Internet was in 1998 in terms of transaction value.
At the same time, the industry will need value-added resellers and system integrators to sell and design products that will speed information sharing and access on mobile devices.
Third-generation mobile devices on the way In the short term, there are a number of technological challenges facing wireless devices, namely, say analysts, transmission speeds, awkward keys and small screens that display only four lines of text.
And forget about video or high-end graphics. Those same analysts say text will be the oneand-only type of media on wireless devices for at least a couple of years.
For high-end graphics and video, resellers will have to wait until the next generation network.
Vendors are expected to roll out third-generation wireless devices and applications in two or three years.
(转贴自 http://www.p2p.net/story/45/ )
老外对BIM的认同和研究 - 茶馆主人 - 2001-01-12 02:57:14
请大家多多指教，第一次贴文章，一时也不出原创作品，就贴一篇洋文的给大家分享，真不好意思。