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Abstract. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is becoming a very powerful strategy for develop more flexible software solutions and to shorten their time-tomarket. Typical SaaS providers are SMEs, which have several limitations to keep competitive. The essential motivation of this work is to provide better means to allow groups of SaaS providers (a Virtual Organization -VO) to work collaboratively towards more valuable SaaS solutions that are composed of individual and shared SaaS providers' services. However, working collaboratively requires handling plenty of issues in many dimensions. This work provides a comprehensive and consolidated list of reference processes that SaaS providers should deal with along the (VO) life cycle of a collaboration. This helps them to better plan and manages their activities and involved assets in a collaboration.

Computing systems are essential nowadays for the execution of companies' business processes and should keep operating permanently. Modern approaches, as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), have been gradually adopted by companies to implement their systems. This paper exploits a Virtual Enterprise (VE) scenario where its members' systems are available as services and are selected to support the VE operation itself. Regarding VE properties and inspired in the autonomic computing paradigm, a resilience architecture and system have been designed and implemented to help VE's supporting system to recover from services' faults, respecting the business processes' QoS in place. Results are presented and discussed in the end.

Systems integration is a key issue to be faced when supporting Virtual Enterprises (VE) execution. However, it is very complex regarding the dynamic composition, autonomy and large distribution of its members as well as the high heterogeneity of IT and business processes' models used by them. It has been realized by many works in the literature that SMEs should have some preparedness, including at the IT level, in order to create a feasible solution for them to get onboard and agilely interoperate in real VEs. This work intends to overcome some drawbacks of current approaches for that, proposing a model where VE partners can more easily get into a VE when it is created (plug) so that the VE can be executed seamlessly during its operation (play) and dissolution (unplug), including the support of some level of semantic interoperability. A prototype has been implemented, and results are discussed.

Abstract. Software sector has become a very important and increasing competitive sector, being mostly composed by SMEs. Enhancing partnerships at a more valuable business level can help companies to attend to wider markets in a more sustainable and agile way taking advantage of assets that they would not have if working alone. One strategy to reach this is via collaborative networks. However, companies should be prepared for that. One of the first issues is to understand more deeply what working collaboratively actually means in businesses and how to support it. This article presents the set of business processes that need to be handled in a collaboration among software service providers throughout its lifecycle. Final results are discussed at the end.

Abstract. 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.