Today, formats and application semantics are the typical way we support vertical standards, but can we move to common services and orchestration in support of SOA. Orchestration layers in support of a particular vertical are the wave of the future. Moreover, with new process portability standards, such as BPEL, and Web services, this promise is becoming more of a reality right now. Perhaps in the future, standards bodies supporting verticals will provide off-the-shelf processes and services that define how a particular business runs, at least in general. We can further break this notion down into:

• Vertical services and processes are the vertical applications created within the process execution and modeling layer. This is where the vertical behavior is defined and processed, and thus is the ultimate value for the end user. These are, in essence, the business applications that have as much to do with business information processing as application integration. While they typically require some domain-specific extensions (see the next paragraph), they should provide most, if not all, of the functionality to service a specific vertical market application requirement.

• Domain-specific extensions, as you may expect, are extensions to the pre-canned processes and services that customize these processes for a specific implementation. In many cases, they will connect pre-canned verticalized processes and services with enterprise processes and services, or even trading community processes and services. These are the processes that make the macro process model unique to a particular organization, but they also mean that somebody has to create them vs. the canned vertical processes and services. These are always present; you can’t buy all processes and services that run your business.