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.