Potential Roles for Business-to-Business Marketplace Providers in Service-Oriented Architectures

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.