That is, the networking revolution has already arrived if you consider the following:

Computing devices with a peer-to-peer networking address (such as Napster and Instant Messaging) now outnumber computing devices with a standard Internet address by an order of magnitude. In hard numbers, that's the equivalent of nearly 200 million P2P addresses versus 23 million top level DNS addresses.

So went some of the comments from a mix of panelists who gathered for the MIT Enterprise Forum in New York last night to discuss the myths and the realities of the peer-to-peer phenomenon.

Panelists were Bob Anderson, who bills himself as the Evangelist of Groove Networks, a p2p platform for work collaboration; Andrew Frank of tech consulting firm Viant; Chris Lawless of Intel Capital's venture fund for P2P PLAYS; Peter Lee, founder and CEO of P2P computing company Datasynapse; Steve Neiman of JP Morgan Chase's high performance computing group; Will Porteous of RRE Ventures, a $350 million venture fund.

Although helped by the wild popularity of consumer file-sharing programs such as Napster and Instant Messenger, P2P has different uses in the corporate world but is similarly ushering in social transformations of how people communicate and build networks.

But what are the limitations and the implications of bringing idle computers together?

Beyond his DNS address example about the P2P phenomenon, moderator Clay Shirky of the Accelerator Group (who also writes a column for Business 2.0 magazine) also urged panelists to help demystify some of P2P's potential.

First of all, realize that distributed computing is not necessarily the same as peer-to-peer networking, said Lee of Datasynapse. The company he helped launch is experiencing significant interest in the financial services and energy sectors for its network of excess computing capacity.

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What is unique about peer-to-peer technology, Lee said, is that it is an enabling technology platform, compared to the "hub and spoke" model of distributed computing across the enterprise.

Think of a trader at a small hedge fund with $80 million or so in assets. "Every night this trader runs 500 jobs spread out over four PCs, each job 22 minutes or so. That type of client really wants outsourced power by the hour and is willing to pay for it and is willing to use it." So the use of the technology here is about "enabling the little guy, not so much the big guy," said Lee.

With that extra capacity, the trader gets the ability to cache data in the idle RAM of the network PC or Internet PCs anywhere and to solve problems on the edge of the network, added Lee. "They don't always have to go back into the central server where the application may be hosted." Instead, the sophisticated network of a major financial service enterprise can achieve conditional, or nested, problem solving.

And although major enterprises that deploy over one hundred thousand PCs across their own intranet may not be the ideal customer for harnessing outside network capacity, they may see economic possibilities in pricing their idle capacity, as long as its feasible from a security standpoint.

And security is a major consideration along with the possibilities, said Porteous of RRE Ventures.

"Right now, we see a big opportunity to meet the demand for computing power in life sciences with distributing computing tools for the enterprise," he said. "Biology is becoming an information science, as researchers build on the success of the human genome project. Analyzing gene sequences, modeling the folding patterns of proteins; these are the types of research applications that need massive amounts of processing power, all of which can be delivered by harnessing commodity desktop PCs."

It's easy to download the software to enable your computer to tie in with another. To do so creates value with its spare resources, said Porteous.

"Such an act could have an impact of making someone else's life better. But the same resource could also be used for less noble purposes."

The computer, as Shirky noted in a recent column, is becoming the promiscuous computer, offering its disc space and processing power to endeavors that may have no benefit to its owner. Think of the benefits to non-profits, for example.

Yet security concerns will continue to bedevil the rise of these networks. This could help slow its use as well as P2P's effect on the company organization and culture, the panelists agreed. Plus, it is not entirely clear, given the cost-lowering effect of Moore's Law, that resources are going to be cheaper to network compared to the cost of harvesting them oneself.

But the impact is already clear, added Shirky.

"Chat is the first business-communications tool that no company which uses it ever signed off on. It's the same way that PCs were smuggled into the enterprise behind the backs of the mainframe guys," he said. "No one ever asked their permission and it just spread."