The distribution of applications and business logic across multiple 
processing platforms.  Distributed processing implies that processing will 
occur on more than one processor in order for a transaction to be 
completed. In other words, processing is distributed across two or more 
machines and the processes are most likely not running at the same time, 
i.e. each process performs part of an application in a sequence. Often the 
data used in a distributed processing environment is also distributed across 
platforms.