Global services: changes and extensions to the role of global service providers

There is a large and still heavily increasing number of national service providers all over the world. Often a national service provider becomes a global service provider by founding an alliance with other national providers. The joint product of such an alliance determines the success in the global market place. Therefore global service providers need global strategies to strengthen their alliance for global competition. A strategy is to exploit upcoming synergy's and enable competition within such an alliance. One flavor of such a strategy is a distributed IN architecture and alliance wide standardization (de facto standards). This means using synergy's and gives equal opportunities to all alliance partners, which means competition as a driving force within the alliance. Global service providers could create a market place in their alliance with national alliance partners offering their services in other national markets of the alliance. Selling service logic as licensed software is a business opportunity in such an alliance.