Integrating Business Processes with Peer-to-Peer Technology

Abstract

Since file sharing tools as eDonkey or Grokster are one of the favouriteapplications for a large number of internet users, the peer-to-peerparadigm experiences a new boom, as it enables very robust, scalable andfault-tolerant architectures. Indeed, the functionality of currentapplications is limited to quite simple operations such as searching anddownloading music files or movies. Hence, to benefit economically fromthe characteristics of Peer-to-Peer technology, there is need ofadditional, innovative applications for business usage. A predestinedscope of application is the context of Business Integration, wherevarious distributed IT-systems act jointly by exchanging data recordsand the corresponding control flow. In this article, we present theconcept of a Peer-to-Peer based integration architecture that solves thestructural problems of traditional integration approaches. It allows aholistic integration of data, applications and business processeswithout the common insufficiencies of existing EAI solutions.