(written in June 2003)
Clearly there is still a dramatic gap between the capabilities of current solutions and the needs of collaborative enterprises looking for adaptive, cost-effective and scalable business integration solutions.
There is a need to develop a systematic and holistic approach to rapidly form Virtual Enterprises based on an ubiquitous (anywhere, anytime) and affordable (easy and cheap) collaborative environment using a secure and interoperable business infrastructure within a multicultural & multilingual context.

Ultimate goal is to realise the vision of turning “inside-out” enterprises as a plug-and-play Internet business community. Actual Extended/Virtual Enterprise approaches create a big dilemma because each time a new partner is entering results in increasing exponentially management and integration costs mostly due to disparate procedures and kingdom solutions which are not interoperable.
Imagine a Mutualisation’s law which drives down integration costs and duration as the number of partners increases, like the Moore’s law with semiconductors driving down computing costs. This Mutualisation’s law also called Eco-Web (Economical Web: the sustainable development which consists to develop once and re-use many times) give access to a frictionless world that has long been the unfulfilled transformational promise of the Internet. It would lead to a real revolution because it impacts the core of how organisations actually works to deliver value to its customers.
It will be much easier for companies to focus on their core business while delivering higher value to their customers through an “Eco-Web” of partners who are each the best of breed at their link in the value chain. Companies can finally unbundled their product innovation and commercialisation business from their infrastructure management business from their customer relationship business. Each of these types of businesses has its own economic drivers and cultures necessary for success, yet most companies have been unable to separate them.
This unbundling capability enabled by the “Eco-Web” will dramatically redefine the enterprise. The traditional boundaries of an enterprise was defined at the frontier where interaction costs were exceeding value created. It will further enables the famous promise of practice re-use and will let business analysts to assemble themselves practice and service “components” to design new business processes and applications by simply click and drag business elements. We are heading towards a world where thousands of practice and service “components” will be produced and consumed by millions of organisations that will dynamically compose their business processes in real-time as easily as click & drag functions.

Along the way of this distant vision, the enterprise will be turned “up-side-down” or more appropriately “inside-out” with more of its internal capabilities visible and accessible from the outside others, and more external capabilities visible and accessible within each enterprise. It means that intellectual capital will become much more important while other forms of capital will be less important than they have been in the past.
The Mutualisation’s law or Eco-Web, through practice and service component network, will not only provide lower costs and greater flexibility required by the collaborative enterprise, but it will also provide higher reliability, manageability and security required for mission-critical business processes. This Eco-Web approach is a superior solution for managing growing complexity and dynamism in relationship. It is “The” solution which enables an unlimited number of organisations to collaborate, with provisioning accomplished in days instead of months or years.