Resources
Applications process resources. A fleet management application will process vehicles, trailers, drivers, way bills, and other resources, for example. Resources are the data at the basis of any application, but more than just data or byte buckets, they are structured data, entities and relations required by applications.

Distributed Resources
These resources can be distributed, for example the fleet vehicles could be organized and stored by country where, for example, the Canadian office could manage the Canadian vehicles for an organization and the US vehicles may be managed by the US office. The head office in Japan, for example may need to manage vehicles in all countries, for some operations (ex: reports). And so on.

Distributed Resource Issues
How compatible should the various databases and vehicle representations be? Who should have access? to what? when? How can this be configured and changed to adapt to new requirements? These are just a few questions from a relatively simple case and already, the costs and issues could rise quickly.