Napster may be in trouble, but the same technology that has recording industry executives quaking in their Gucci loafers may yet find a home in corporate networks. "Peer to peer is here," says John Wollman, senior vice president of solutions at Alliance Consulting. Alliance, a New York City-based IT consultancy, is using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to tie its employees and customers together more tightly than traditional technologies ever allowed.

Thanks to a highly efficient network architecture?plus a ton of hype?P2P is capturing the attention of a growing number of CIOs. P2P technology allows every server and workstation on a network to act as servers to all other users. This means that individuals on a P2P network can freely share information and resources, such as applications, files and storage devices, providing an unprecedented degree of collaboration?or intimacy, as Wollman describes it.

But is P2P all that it’s cracked up to be? Maybe, says James C. Smith, a senior analyst at the Hurwitz Group, a technology market research company in Framingham, Mass. "P2P builds on the Internet viewpoint of decentralized information access, so it’s hard to argue against an approach that’s been so phenomenally successful," he says. Using millions of servers worldwide, the Internet has made information access easy and ubiquitous from almost anywhere. On the other hand, P2P comes with some heavy baggage, including performance, management, security and legal concerns. "What remains to be seen is whether the advantages will overwhelm the drawbacks or vice versa," says Smith.

Affinity to Infinity

Perhaps the biggest benefit P2P provides is easy, direct access to information. By using P2P to create an "affinity community," an organization can allow employees and other interested parties to share a wide array of files on marketing, technical documents and other key matters. In such an environment, individuals cannot only view content but also move the information from a peer system to their own workstations (in the same way a Napster user can download a song from a fellow user’s PC). "If you trade a lot of information from desk to desk this could be good for you," says Malcolm Maclachlan, media e-commerce analyst at IDC, a technology research company (and sister company to CIO’s publisher, CXO Media) in Framingham, Mass. "P2P can be a particularly useful tool for organizations that have widely dispersed employees and clients."

After testing a P2P network for about seven months, Wollman is convinced that the technology is a good investment. Alliance is using P2P technology developed by Groove Networks, a Beverly, Mass.-based P2P software developer founded by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie, to interconnect onsite workers and external employees and clients. (Other major P2P technology vendors include Gonesilent, Pointera, Roku and uRoam.) "Previously, we relied heavily on e-mail, fax and phone calls," says Wollman. Now, he notes, network users have open access to files, proposal development, job tracking and product management, all of which add up to "general meeting avoidance." "With peer to peer we can collaborate more closely on projects, which leads to a very high degree of customer intimacy," says Wollman.