A Partner object defines an external entity, such as Bank, Government or Trading partner, that can be the origin or destination of an exchange. A Partner can address a company, a department within a company or a software application.
Unlike an Application object, the location of a Partner is not known. That is, you do not know the properties of its host machine (operating system, network type).
Whereas you always define an Application on a specific Host object, you define a Partner on a HostGroup. Alternatively, the Partner can be unlocalized. An unlocalized Partner is attached to the root HostGroup.
To communicate with a Partner, you must define one or more CommPoints for the object. The CommPoint defines how to access the Partner. A Partner can contain several CommPoints, for example, one for FTP, one for PeSIT / X.25 and one for SMTP.