Collaborative Working in an ISP Environment Sathya Rao Telscom AG, Switzerland Eric Mannie-Corbisier Perceval Technologies SA, Belgium Leszek Siwik The Center of Mobile Technologies Mobiltek, Poland C INTRODUCTION The way of life has changed with the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) in every one's day to day activities and the business. As ICT technologies are constantly evolving, many people attribute the success of enterprises to the ways they deploy and take advantage of new technologies, not only to make their operations more efficient but most importantly to refine and adopt new effective and adaptive business models. Since the advent of the Internet and the very first Internet service providers (ISP) in operation, the traditional ISP market has been in constant evolution due to the gradual globalisation and commoditisation of ISP services. Deregulation and ICT policies have fostered competition (e.g., un- bundling of the local loop and so forth) as well. The Internet is as an important channel of interaction inside and/or outside enterprises. The essence of the Internet is conducting business and running of business proc- esses over data communication networks based on non- proprietary standards (Porter, 2001). The World Wide Web as a portal represents a major electronic business (e-business) platform accessed through communication channels provisioned by network and service providers (such as ISDN, DSL, WLAN, UMTS, etc.). There are many challenging aspects of the e-Business that must be considered for a sustainable business of an ISP (Petrie et al., 2004). Among such significant aspects the fol- lowing have to be taken into consideration: 1. The impact of business globalisation: most or- ganisations are coping with the globalisation of the economy and the importance to be visible at global markets. User of ICT and partnerships represent the digi- talisation of the entire economy. 3. 4. 5. 6. The introduction of new communication technolo- gies and channels forces organisations to revise the way they conduct business. Use of skills independent of the location to deliver cost-effective solutions. The increased end user or customer mobility obliges organisations to propose tailored service offers adapted to new conditions. Small and medium-size enterprises are taking a leading role in delivering tailored services, by making use of the ICT and skills available with partners. 2. Small and medium-size enterprises (SME) being backbone of the national economy and creative busi- ness development, it is important to develop the flex- ible platform so that skills and expertise of SMEs can be used in the global business model, for competitive solutions development. This paper identifies the busi- ness models and business scenarios with such a cluster of SMEs acting as a virtual Internet service provider (VISP) but it has to be mentioned in this place that the goal of this paper is to present the concept, the initia- tive, business models and market context of VISP rather than for example architectural details which are quite complicated and have been (Pollet et al., 2006) and will be precisely described in other papers. The Virtual enterprises can operate at community level (without having a registered trademark) or as a registered single company (enterprise mode). The business model ad- dressed in this paper addresses both these modes of virtual enterprise targeting the VISP business. This article is organised as follows: In the Back- ground section, why such an initiative as VISP has been taken up is explained. The concept of VISP is introduced both from traditional and the one adopted in this paper points of view. The new approach to VISP Copyright © 2008, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.