Integrating business processes with peer-to-peer technology

Since file sharing tools as eDonkey or Grokster are one of the favourite applications for a large number of internet users, the peer-to-peer paradigm experiences a new boom, as it enables very robust, scalable and fault-tolerant architectures. Indeed, the functionality of current applications is limited to quite simple operations such as searching and downloading music files or movies. Hence, to benefit economically from the characteristics of Peer-to-Peer technology, there is need of additional, innovative applications for business usage. A predestined scope of application is the context of Business Integration, where various distributed IT-systems act jointly by exchanging data records and the corresponding control flow. In this article, we present the concept of a Peer-to-Peer based integration architecture that solves the structural problems of traditional integration approaches. It allows a holistic integration of data, applications and business processes without the common insufficiencies of existing EAI solutions.