P2P is growing up and going corporate. The profitable future of one of the most notoriously frowned upon technologies -- peer-to-peer file sharing -- could lie in the enterprise market.
Case in point: Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate services provider, whose business has nothing to do with media, is using an enterprise file-sharing program internally to exchange everything from training videos to CEO announcements.
"The poster child for P2P is the enterprise solution," said Brian Jensen, a managing director of global corporate communications at Cushman & Wakefield, speaking on a panel at Streaming Media West. It does for us what we could not do before -- provide rich media content to employees. And it gives us invaluable tracking tools. Before we had this solution, we would put a video on our intranet, and if five people watched it the system would crash."
But Jensen says his IT department hasn't been horribly receptive to the idea of using file sharing technology on the network even now.
"When we tried to introduce P2P to our IT group they said 'Forget it, it ain't happening,'" he says. "After they saw the network tests [of the software] they said, 'We would rather you not use P2P on our network. Put the files on the centralized network and we'll distribute it. In fact, I don't think they know that we're using it now unless they see this [panel] . . . The technology has matured but the story needs to be told better."
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