Packeteer, Allot and others go one step further. They scan to see which software applications are using a network, and they control the amount of bandwidth that's allocated to each application. That means that, as some universities do, companies can shut down altogether or allotted just a trickle of bandwidth to software like Kazaa.
Analysts say bandwidth management is likely to survive over the long term. Particularly as bandwidth prices rise again as expected over the next few years, tightly controlling the network space that's used by each program can save money quickly, analysts say.
"By spending this money, companies can avoid having to buy another T1 (network connection) and can very easily show return on the investment," Meta Group analyst Jerald Murphy said.
Packeteer chief executive Dave Cote says most of his customers aren't initially coming to him to control file swapping, and he worries about his company being pigeonholed as an anti-file-swapping service. Indeed, it is only after running the monitoring tool that most customers realise they have a problem, he said.
"It's in people's minds; they are aware of it, so when they see it, they want to block it," Cote said. "For corporate customers, it is on the list of negative programs but often not as high as things like streaming video."
Allot chief executive Narayanan predicts that these are the early days of an education campaign for companies and that ultimately, these issues of potential legal liability and destructive effects on corporate network resources will universally be taken more seriously.
"It's just like sexual harassment 20 years ago, when only a few big companies might have had an explicit policy against it," Narayan said. "Today, every company small and large has a very specific policy. I think it is going to be the same way with music downloading. Corporate America will have to have a policy for fear of liability."
