What Is Collaboration? An Analytical Cut from the Business Processes and SaaS Perspectives

This paper refers to how the collaboration among members of a Virtual Organization composed of software services providers can be enlarged within a SOA/SaaS scenario, maintaining partners’ independence, autonomy and heterogeneity. It considers the situation where software companies work collaboratively to meet business opportunities so attending wider markets in a more agile way and with less risk, taking advantage of opportunities, capacities and capabilities that they would not have alone. Working collaboratively is not a mere wish. Companies should know and be prepared for supporting the required processes and to implement related practices. That is the goal of this article and ongoing research: to elicit the additional processes that are necessary to be supported by such a companies in the act of collaborating under the SOA/SaaS scenario.