An evolving plug-and-play business infrastructure for networked organisations

This paper introduces a distributed and open ICT infrastructure that is being developed in the ECOLEAD IST IP project to help members of Collaborative Networks in doing businesses and collaborations more efficiently. ICT-I design relies on the service oriented architecture paradigm and it is implemented with web-services. ICT-I services are to be used on demand and pay-per-use models. It is flexible to support an easy entrance of new services and the withdrawn of others. So far the type of organizations envisaged by the proposed ICT-I are virtual breeding environments, virtual organizations and professional virtual communities. This paper details the ICT-I requirements, its architecture and services as well as implementation issues. Conclusions and current challenges are presented in the end.