P2P agents for software distribution - saving the WAN from meltdown?!?

To address the original question, there are several p2p companies focusing on optimizing p2p for internal distribution of software and rich media. In particular, Kontiki and Ignite both offer such services, and between the two have many of the Fortune 1000 as customers (Coke, Bank of America, Accenture, McDonalds, Canon, Burger King, etc.). Their systems manage not just the (p2p) physical delivery of the bits, but also the enterprise management aspects (e.g. sending the right versions of the right software to the right desktops, managing data flow in a way that works well on a corporate LAN, security, running the installs/upgrades, etc.).

Addressing the Revision3 comment in the thread, I don't think that the "RIAA and similar organizations" had any problem with Revision3 using the BitTorrent protocol, but with them running an (inadvertently) open Tracker that was hosting 250K pirate torrents. The "attack" was pretty clearly a MediaDefender software bug in their code that monitors pirate torrents, multiplied by the large number of servers that they run, which unfortunately kicked in over a holiday weekend when nobody was around to fix it. Once MediaDefender was notified of the problem, Revision3 said that it was fixed quickly. So while you may not like what MediaDefender does for a living, it doesn't look like they were trying to DDOS Revision3 for using p2p protocols.

- Laird Popkin, CTO, Pando Networks
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