Evolving e-commerce technologies increasingly enable organisations to participate in different types of network forms or in electronic markets with previously unidentified trading partners. Virtual organisations (VO) take different forms, have varying lifecycles and involve different scope and depth of relationships. This paper examines the literature in terms of the terminology of virtual organisations, the business drivers, the common theoretical concepts and models as well as the enabling technologies. A specific form of VO, Request Based Virtual Organisation (RB VO), is then considered in relation tothese VO variants, particularly as realised through the practical work done within the framework of the EU sponsored LA URA project that facilitates interregional zones of adaptive electronic commerce.

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Similarly to the high-end market segment, a large number 0/ ERP installations in the small and medium market segments also/ails or results in time and cost overruns. To overcome those difficulties, a partnership-based e-business model amongst value chain actors is proposed. This model is supported by a plat{orm, which engages and involves local actors in flexible multinational e-collaborations ({orming European clusters in the ERP industry), in order to expand and broaden their activities. The envisaged outcome is to improve re.lponse times, low cost operations, flexibility toward.~ clients, and provision o{ high-quality services tailored at end customers, facilitating the whole value chain to act as a single business entity (Virtual Organization).

Current ICT trends provide new opportunities to implement some well-known models of e-collaboration between business partners, namely Virtual Organizations. The orientation towards Enterprise Social Computing naturally complements the way companies do business with each other, thus the new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 based solutions can help to develop systems better suited for modern business needs. This paper presents an architecture based on SOA and Intelligent agents, which is aimed to address the needs of European SMEs involved in ERP software business. The solution is based on the concept of Digital Business Ecosystem, an environment and software infrastructure, which can help a community of potential business partners to establish and maintain valuable business relationships. Such ecosystem provides its members with value-added services like reputation management, peer-to-peer negotiation of business terms and flexible partner search through usage of Intelligent Agents technology in overall SOA-based framework.

Virtual Enterprises or Organisations (VO) have been the focus of research for over a decade 1. Although proprietary implementations of VO management tools exist, secure tools based on interoperating open standards are not yet available. The open standards on which to build them are just being released as reliable implementations. The requirements of VOs for trust and security are presented, which lead to an architecture for a secure VO management framework. The design of such a framework is analysed to show how the current open Web Service specifications could be used to implement it in practice. The need for the reliable and interoperable implementation of these essential Web Services specifications is advocated.