B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

484 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
16.5. But the Road is Winding
P2P technology is indeed alluring. But the road to designing, developing
and executing P2P-based applications is not a straight one. There are
several major challenges that may hamper its early adoption, especially
in B2B applications.
Some of the potential problems with P2P-based architectures in the
light of B2Bi follow:
16.5.1. Network bandwidth
A critical factor of the success of peer-to-peer technology is the
bandwidth available. If companies use P2P-based applications for B2B
integration, it may severely slow down their network connections and
hamper the core business activities. By definition, P2P applications
eliminate central servers and create a loose, dynamic network of peers.
For any content retrieval operation, such as a search for a specific item
in a catalog, all the peers in the network are searched, using a lot of
network bandwidth. As this network size increases and becomes more
distributed, it may be affected by poor and slow connections. Further,
as the number of peers searching for content or communicating in the
network increases, the resulting traffic can potentially block the whole
network bandwidth.
For instance, the traffic generated by Gnutella, an open, decentralized,
peer-to-peer search system for files, is enormous. A Gnutella search is
broadcast across a network that changes from moment to moment,
going from one individual computer to four others, from those to sixteen
others and so on. The search results are returned along the same
pathway they originally traveled.
16.5.2. Security
The most important feature of the P2P-based application — decentralized,
distributed architecture — is also its weakest link. P2P applications
pose major security threats to companies, as by definition the peer
network involves distributing data and computing resources over several
peers. B2B applications require communication with external parties,