An Intel executive preached the company's peer-to-peer and collaborative computing mantra during a keynote speech at the eBusiness Conference and Expo here on Wednesday.
Enterprises are transitioning to distributed services, accessible by all devices, said Louis Burns, vice president and general manager for the desktop platforms group at Intel.
"The enterprise really now becomes your computing platform," in which all devices provide and access services, Burns said.
Peer-to-peer computing, he said, allows knowledge workers to communicate, collaborate, and create. Collaboration now involves connecting people to people, people to machines, and enterprises to enterprises, he said.
"Peer-to-peer really has opened the door to get access to computing vehicles that we've not had before," Burns said.
Intel's own collaborative efforts have resulted in its doing $US2 billion of monthly business online and enabling Intel employees worldwide to connect to a corporate intranet, he said.
An audience member, Raymond Gilbert, senior sales executive at portal vendor Portal Wave, said Burns pointed out the importance of communication and collaboration.
"What he really was talking about was collaboration between groups within companies," and also in extending it to suppliers and customers, Gilbert said.
Burnss' presentation featured product demonstrations iKimbo, which offers collaboration software, and Autonomy Corp. which provides access to unstructured data for workgroups.
"There's this tsunami of data out there and very little information," Burns said, commenting on enterprises' need to organize unstructured data.
