Potential roles for business-to-business marketplace providers in service-oriented architectures

  • Authors:

  • Markus Lenz;Markus Greunz

  • Affiliations:

  • University of St. Gallen, Switzerland;University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Managing e-commerce and mobile computing technologies
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The chapter introduces the concept of a service-oriented architecture and assesses its applicability to business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces. In order to provide substantial value to their members, marketplaces have to offer a comprehensive service offering which aims to support all phases of the transaction process. Building up such a service offering is not a one-time effort; electronic B2B marketplaces will have to evolve their service offerings continually and adapt them to the ever-changing needs of the companies they serve. Therefore, instead of trying to create such an extensive service offering on their own, we argue that B2B marketplaces have to make use of partnerships with specialized service providers.They can make use of the speed and scale of such a collaboration of specialists only by partnering (Ernst et al., 2001). This view of B2B marketplaces as integrators of services from multiple parties puts some new demands on architectural issues of the marketplaces. A service-oriented architecture may help to cope with these new demands. To test this view, a survey among European B2B marketplaces has been conducted in order to match their service development and their needs with the characteristics of a service-oriented architecture and the potential roles that marketplace providers can play in such a concept.