Software sector has become a very important and increasing competitive sector, being mostly composed by SMEs. Enhancing partnerships at a more valuable business level can help companies to attend to wider markets in a more sustainable and agile way taking advantage of assets that they would not have if working alone. One strategy to reach this is via collaborative networks. However, companies should be prepared for that. One of the first issues is to understand more deeply what working collaboratively actually means in businesses and how to support it. This article presents the set of business processes that need to be handled in a collaboration among software service providers throughout its lifecycle. Final results are discussed at the end.