A literature review of inter-enterprise SOA in small and medium business communities

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables organizations to cooperate in expanding their businesses and creating new opportunities by connecting multiple participant's resources. However, some organizations are not yet ready to integrate with this inter-enterprise SOA environment due to their internal traditional IT-based systems. So, to face the challenge of market and system expansion, they first have to enable their systems for collaboration. This paper explores and analyses SOA implementation aspects in the small and medium enterprise (SME) communities by using systematic literature review method. This work presents facts regarding the state of SME community, i.e. the attributes, existing IT architectures, and the adopted collaboration frameworks. Virtual organization (VO) with its variants is a prominent model to establish in the ICT-based SME community. The centralized system is the dominant architectural structure types proposed due to the natural characteristics of SOA and SMEs.