The April 18 issue of BusinessWeek (with the cover story “IBM — Beyond Blue”) included a piece on the battle between IBM and Microsoft for control of the collaboration software market. In that article, BusinessWeek wrote that “IBM doesn’t offer a rival technology” to the peer-to-peer technology Microsoft now owned, via its acquisition of Ray Ozzie’s company, Groove, which “lets workers at different companies easily collaborate on projects through corporate firewalls.”
IBM doesn’t deny this. Sitting down with the editors of SearchDomino recently, Ambuj Goyal, general manager of the Lotus software division, did not mince words. “We do not like peer-to-peer,” he said.
When asked why, Goyal said, “Frankly, peer-to-peer is not a business value proposition. The peer-to-peer proposition says I can exchange documents between two companies without going through the server. But the company has no clue as to what type of information is being exchanged. The real issue is whether two companies can share documents, securely, not whether the technology is router or router plus server.”
Earlier, I had spoken to David Marshak, IBM’s senior product manager for collaboration. Marshak also believes that a peer-to-peer buddy list model is the wrong collaboration model for business. More appropriate for business, he said, is a requester/resource model, since in that environment, you ask questions and seek information from others (on a role basis) who do not necessarily ask anything from you.
Read the story @ SearchDomino
Related Stories
- Peer-to-peer in the cell phone industry?
- Supreme Court Standards for Peer-to-Peer and Beyond
- RawFlow on why Peer-to-Peer technologies will revolutionise webcasting as we know it
- Legal Peer-to-Peer Emerges from the Grokster Fire
- Future of peer-to-peer file sharing networks remains uncertain
