The Internet enterprise

Abstract

In this paper we present our vision of the Internet enterprise: a highly interoperable, virtual enterprise infrastructure for individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. In the Internet enterprise (IE), any service provider can enable its business to be programmatically accessible on the Internet (becomes an e-service). Enabled by a scalable brokering service and an inter-organizational workflow facility, e-services offered by autonomous service providers could be composed into an "Internet workflow". This paper describes this vision through an architecture that treats e-services as workflow participants in Internet-wide workflow automation applications. We present the architecture and implementation of three core components that enable the Internet Enterprise. These are: (1) BizBuilder, an e-service framework, (2) Sangam, a scalable, hierarchical brokering community based on UDDI, and (3) a dynamic workflow engine that uses e-services as entities, to create and enact workflow models. Collectively, these three components empower the Internet as a "public enterprise", where virtually any person or organization can design workflow models, and hence create new businesses, using available, competing e-services.