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New marketplaces are emerging that are designed to meet a wide array of diverse needs. Regardless of the product or service offering, the design intention of such marketplaces is to provide a mechanism by which buyers and sellers come together to complete a satisfactory transaction. Recent research indicates (Roth, 2007) that in order for new emerging markets to survive, market designers must understand the workings and requirements of the marketplace in question. In particular, equilibrium of buyers and sellers must be achieved wherein buyers are capable of making acceptable choices among alternative offerings. As technology is increasingly being utilized to automate business processes, we are witnessing the emergence of the Web Services electronic marketplace that has been designed to provide a mechanism by which buyers and sellers of business services delivered via Web Services technologies can benefit from the efficiencies provided by a centralized marketplace. In question, however, is whether an effective mechanism is in place within the marketplace that will enable buyers of business services to make suitable choices among the various alternatives available. The purpose of this research is to conduct an examination of a Web Services Marketplace in an effort to determine the effectiveness of the buyer/seller relationship and to develop the tools necessary for such an examination.
Business Services Delivered via the Web Services Mechanism
A 2006 IDC report states that 2007 will see the beginning of a “hyper-disruption” in business models as business processes are offered as business services through online delivery mechanisms (IDC, 2006). Emerging Internet standards such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) are allowing the development of reusable Web services to encapsulate and distribute business processes as business services on an interoperable platform and implement business collaborations within and across organizational and system boundaries (van der Aalst et al., 2006; Ran, 2003). Albrecht et al. (2005) posit that Web services offer many advantages not offered by earlier technologies in this context.
As organizational boundaries become less defined and customers increasingly expect real time responses from organizations, there is increasing need for the flexibility offered by business services delivered through the Web services mechanism. Web Services are technologies that allow application interaction crossing firm or company boundaries economically and incrementally and have significantly transformed the nature of inter-organizational commercial activities (Moitra & Ganesh, 2005). According to Moitra and Ganesh (2005), Web Services denote a set of technologies that allow business processes or information to be accessed over the Internet. This functionality facilitates the buying and selling of business services, utilizing the Internet as the sales medium. In this context, we find the emergence of new marketplaces such as CloudABCDY.com (real name of the company is hidden) as a Web Services Marketplace where companies can buy and sell their business services delivered through the Web Services mechanism.