ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the applicability of various peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies to different business-to-business(B2B) relations and brings insights to the future deployment of P2P technologies for B2B applications. The possibility of using P2P networking for interorganizational collaboration has recently been attracting increasing attention. During communication in P2P networks, conventional security mechanisms, such as firewall software, are frequently circumvented. The implementation of P2P technology is accompanied by the problem of locating resources that may be significantly more difficult to identify than MP3 files within context specific file sharing systems. The implementation of P2P networks for B2B exchanges offers benefits like resource sharing and aggregation, lower cost of ownership, robustness, scalability and reliability, dynamism, and enhanced ad hoc connectivity and collaboration. Different Web services are designed to work together and interoperability is a fundamental goal. It is found that P2P technology becomes an important solution to certain inherent problems in B2B applications.
