Support of Virtual Enterprises by an Integration Infrastructure

Enterprises cooperate more extensively with other enterprises in various forms. These collaboration forms need suitable infrastructures and supporting applications to realize the collaboration. This paper presents new ideas and requirements for such an integration infrastructure. The evolution of enterprise business systems is accompanied by an evolution in the integration domain. The former results in current c-commerce applications. The technology and functionality features that an integration infrastructure should offer to enterprises to engage in c-commerce activities are described. An integration infrastructure capability stack is defined that contains a dimension consisting of connectivity, transformation, routing, and process management layers, and a dimension of functional environments.