SPIKE will develop a software platform for the easy and fast setup of business alliances. The project targets two main organisational objectives: first, outsourcing parts of the value chain to business partners (and vice versa, offering such parts in form of services); second, enabling collaboration between members of participating organisations through ad-hoc created as well as predefined business processes. SPIKE will enable collaboration and cooperation between the networked enterprises. The solution will encompass a semantically enriched service oriented infrastructure including a virtual semantic service bus for workflow control and handling and transformation of messages. At the enterprise interface level, we follow a collaborative process portal approach, capturing the user's working context and seamlessly transmitting it to other applications and services according to the current workflow. This will also enable integration of legacy systems via tailored portlets and connectors. Special focus will be put on the security issues involved; the solution will include an easy-to-administer security infrastructure for the networked enterprise which will provide security services for service and workflow management.The user partners will demonstrate the potential of SPIKE at the case of pilot deployments and use cases, i.e. a collaborative business alliance and two services ready for use in the networked enterprise. Because of its focus, the project will have an impact on organizations of all sizes that want to collaborate with each other. The base SPIKE components will be developed as an open source solution, with a special emphasis on easy adoption and cost feasibility. Where possible, we will build upon and enhance existing open source software. This way, SPIKE will have a special impact on SMEs. It will enable them to offer their services to potential new customers in a cost-saving and timely manner.