How can business partners establish a relationship of trust in order to share Web Services?

Abstract: Introduction Web Services is a relatively new concept to distributed data systems. It provides a new way for companies to easily integrate with other companies. With UDDI, companies are able to host their services in a wider market and also connect to other companies. However, with business expansion also follows trust issues. In order to share Web Services in a business partner relationship it is necessary to have a relation of trust. Purpose The purpose of this thesis is to investigate about this issue, i.e. how Web Services with the use of UDDI can be made as a “network of trust” and additionally obtain an idea about how the use of these two will look like in the future. The question of trust between partners sharing Web Services is still open. There has therefore been an interest to look at this problem. The aim for this thesis is to find possible solutions that can be used to address the problem. Method To investigate this we chose to do a literature study and continue with a survey consisted by interviews and questionnaires. Interviews were used to find which solutions that are available in reality and the questionnaires provide information about to what extent Web services and the found solutions are used. The questionnaire was done on random Swedish companies and was sent by e-mails. The interviews were done on two global Swedish companies, Volvo and Ericsson. This way information was found and could be compared in how the issue is dealt with in the literature and what is actually done in reality. Conclusion The outcome of the entire investigation is that Web Services today, even though it exists in most companies, is still in testing phase. As for this, the use of UDDI has had little attention and so has the issues regarding trust. The solution we found to the most applicable to create a network of trust is the Liberty Alliance Project. Web Services, UDDI, trust