Among the many interesting sessions being held at this year’s Supernova conference is one entitled “Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy?” The premise of this panel discussion is to explore the range of under-the-radar activities - such as search marketing and behavioral targeting - that may be forming the “real economic backbone” of the Web.

The Internet economy is usually associated with the disruptive forces being wrought by the likes of emerging or well-established players such as Google and Amazon on consumer-facing marketplaces. However, another economic effect of Web technology that is just starting to be felt is the decomposition of traditional organizations into loosely coupled confederations of business units and entrepreneurs.

This is being driven by approaches such as service-oriented architecture, software as a service, and Web 2.0. At an operational level, the applications that drive business are increasingly being standardized and decomposed to the point where they can be assembled or disassembled into composite applications that can be adapted to changing business processes. At a higher level, we may be doing the same with organizations.

A couple of years ago, John Crupi, CTO of JackBe Corporation, and formerly CTO of the Enterprise Web Service Practice at Sun Microsystems, identified this phenomenon as the “composite company,” which essentially will be a collection of services drawn from other enterprises. Another way to describe this type of organization is the “loosely coupled enterprise.”

The loosely coupled enterprise aggregates services on an on-demand basis to meet customer demands, on demand. Many, if not all, of such services may be provided from third parties. The impact on business agility and speed to market will be enormous.

That loosely coupled enterprise is already a reality today in many sectors. I’ve had the opportunity to sit in on seminar led by Mohan Sawhney, professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, who observes that many of the best-run companies may not be producers themselves, but networks of producers, orchestrated by a front-end broker of services. Sawhney says, for example, that some mobile phone companies already provide a good example of this orchestrator role, in that “they don’t do anything themselves, they just collect the money.” Networking equipment giant Cisco Systems comes close to this orchestrator model: “85 percent of Cisco’s products are never touched by a Cisco employee,” he pointed out.

Just as businesses are evolving into loosely coupled components, so to are the systems that support them. “Five years from now, the concept of an application will be obsolete,” Sawhney said. “They will all be services, combined, mixed, matched and reused as needed.”

Over the years, there has been a great deal of angst about the viability of the “hollow” corporation, which links processes and services to customers, but produces nothing itself. Thanks to new technologies, what was a linear supply chain is now close to being a synchronous network, affording better visibility and control over processes.

In turn, the rise of the loosely coupled company may open up new opportunities for smaller businesses that can provide these required services. Trends in the software industry may point to the shape of things to come. In a book published last year, Bob Walsh identified a new breed of company: the “Micro-ISV” (independent software vendor). As applications continue to break down into loosely coupled components, enterprises will rely more on functions provided through the Software as a Service model, versus developing and maintaining everything in house.

The industry is still wrestling with issues with universal online identity and security, as well as reliability and data storage to address issues posed by reliance on a network of services, versus a single service provider.

MicroISVs may be the providers of these service-oriented components, perhaps charging for individual services on a per-transaction basis. A MicroISV may be an entrepreneur working from a spare bedroom; or it may be a unit of a larger non-IT enterprise as well. Online marketplaces can bring together both producers and consumers of Web services to fulfill such on-demand requirements. In addition, many of the new software startups today prefer to deliver their products over the Web, as on demand services.

One microtransaction may be a few pennies, but a few thousand a day across many services will begin to add up to some real money.