Vision e-company: The network-centric enterprises

The Vision e-Company Research Program investigates how information exchanges, out-sourcing and process cooperation will change professional links within and between businesses and determine the standards, which will become the norm in e-business. This paper gives an overview of the projects launched in the scope of this program and presents their main results concerning extended and virtual enterprises. It introduces in particular: a communication set-vices infrastructures for collaborative processes that reduces the information overflow within horizontal enterprise organizations, several ways for sharing and integrating customer knowledge, a portal for building virtual enterprises through partnerships, a method for analyzing the impact of enterprises e-transformations, an infrastructure for hosting and managing business processes of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME).