The Potential of Web Services for Electronic Business-to-Business Marketplaces in Europe

摘要

In order to provide substantial value to their members marketplaces have to offer a comprehensive service offering that aims to support all phases of the transaction process. Building up such a service offering is not a one-time effort, but electronic B2B marketplaces will have to continuously evolve their service offerings and to adapt it to 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. Only by partnering they can make use of speed and scale of such a collaboration of specialists (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 carried out in order to match their service development and their needs with the characteristics of a service-oriented architecture.