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This paper points out the need of advanced collaborative business ICT infrastructures (CBI) for CNOs, the requirements for the development of CBIs, and the technologies and trends considering CNO issues. The CBI devised in the ECOLEAD Project is also presented, showing how most of these requirements and emergent ICTs have been incorporated in it. This CBIcalled ICT-I -is a distributed, open and security-embedded infrastructure, and it relies on the service oriented architecture paradigm. Its services are to be used under the on demand and pay-per-use models. The assessment of ICT-I, some conclusions and challenges are presented in the end.

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This paper presents a distributed and open ICT infrastructure that is being developed in the ECOLEAD 1ST IP project to help members of Collaborative Networks in doing businesses and collaborations more efficiently. ICT-I design relies on the sewice 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 It is flexible to support an easy entrance of new sei-vices and the withdrawn of others. So far the type of organizations envisaged by the proposed ICT-I are the ones members of virtual breeding environments, virtual organizations and professional virtual communities. This paper details the ICT-I requirements, its architecture and services. A small description of a first ICT-I prototype is given in the end.

Brokerage and partners search is an important activity in the creation phase of a virtual enterprise (VE), where the most adequate consortium of enterprises should be selected to respond to a given business opportunity obtained by a broker. This paper proposes a multi-agent-based architecture to support this fUnctionality in the context of a cluster of twelve enterprises in the moulds and die sector. The system includes a broker agent, a facilitator and consortium agents that plan the possible VEs, and a set of agents representing the enterprises participating in the cluster. The contract-net protocol is used to collect bids from cluster members and to select the most adequate ones. In case the cluster does not cover all the requirements a more general search for partners can be performed on Internet-based directories of enterprises.

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