A growing number of high-tech firms are using peer-to-peer services to help businesses share computer resources, and have made money doing it - something Napster Inc. and the recording industry are struggling to achieve with music-sharing P2P ventures.
A case in point: The engineers at Mosaid Technologies Inc. needed to verify through computer simulations that their expensive memory chip designs functioned properly before shipping them to Nortel Networks Corp., Cisco System Inc. and other customers.
But the 80 engineers had access to only a handful of computer servers to run chip simulations, and they'd often perform tests simultaneously without telling one another - an oversight that would overload and crash the machines.
"We didn't have an intelligent system to decide how we organize this queue," says Lluis Paris, Mosaid's director of integrated circuit technologies.
To put an end to those scheduling conflicts, Mr. Paris bought a P2P networking product from Markham, Ont.-based Platform Computing Corp. that automatically manages computer availability and shares computer resources, such as idle desktop computers and servers, across a company's network. This allows unused processing power and hard drive space to be put to work.
"Time to market is critical," Mr. Paris says. "So with this, we optimized the usage and everybody has access to the most powerful machines."
P2P technology got a big boost when the investment arm of Intel Corp., after reviewing more than 100 business plans, spent an undisclosed amount on a handful of P2P startups last year, including Groove Networks Inc. of Massachusetts, says Scott Darling, director of e-business ventures at Intel Capital.
The chipmaker anticipates several ways that businesses will use P2P technology, he says. For instance, companies can run on-line communities to swap internal data with their suppliers. Or, people may rent time on their PCs when they are idle at night to companies that need huge amounts of processing power to crunch data.
Enthusiasts are already leaving millions of computers on at night so that scientists at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute can download and sift through radio telescope data for evidence of life from space through its SETI@home initiative, Mr. Darling says.
Platform Computing, which employs 350 people, is a pioneer in P2P technology. Company co-founder Songnian Zhou wrote a PhD dissertation on distributed computing in 1987 and led a research team at the University of Toronto that developed a prototype, which eventually was commercialized in 1992 by Platform.
"It takes a long time for the world to figure out ways to capitalize on these technologies," Mr. Zhou says.
Today, Platform's long list of customers is spread across a host of sectors, including aerospace, telecommunications, automotive, oil and gas, and includes Mosaid, Nortel and Boeing Co. While Mr. Zhou declined to disclose earnings, he says the company has been profitable since its first year and has annual sales approaching $100-million.
P2P technology player NextPage Inc. of Lehi, Utah, caters to accounting and law firms such as Deloitte & Touche and Ernst & Young. Its products allow companies to connect all their offices around the world, enabling employees to search for data residing on any of their computers.
NextPage charges $85,000 (U.S.) for its product, plus a user fee.
The company - which was founded in July, 1999, and employs 230 people - has more than 150 customers and expects to be profitable by the end of the year, says chief executive officer Bill Wesemann. P2P "has been pretty popular in the consumer space," he says. "But as a business model it hasn't been proven yet."
"There's no doubt the consumer market has really struggled with that," adds Darren Lee, NextPage's vice-president of strategy and marketing.
"We're lucky in the business market that inherently people pay money for this because there's some obvious business gains they're able to realize from that."
Others that hope to cash in on the P2P technology include Toronto-based Myubi Search Technologies, whose founders are still in university. The company, which has raised about $500,000 is working on an alpha version of its product that will allow company employees to access and search any piece of data on their network - whether it's Word files, e-mails or images, says Jeremy Burman, Myubi's 20-year-old vice-president of research.
If Myubi's talks with a major client prove fruitful, Mr. Burman - who is studying commerce at the University of Toronto - says he'll quit school immediately to help run the startup.