Service Oriented Architectues (SOAs) help increase enterprise flexibility and asset reuse. They enable the orchestration of services into end-to-end business processes. But many traditional Business Process Management (BPM) tools are proprietary. That’s where the emerging specification called Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) comes in.

In the ebizQ webinar Enabling a Service Oriented Architecture With BPEL, part of the Oracle-sponsored series Increasing Business Velocity, Oracle App Server 10g Product Management Team member John Deeb explained how BPEL is helping to take SOAs to the next level: that of a true enterprise aid.

“Every organization is faced with the need to predict changes in this global business environment,” he said, “to rapidly respond to competitors, and best deploy organizational assets to prepare for growth. You must improve your ability to predict and respond to change, which means having an information architecture that is flexible.

“Leveraging more from existing assets is a real business challenge right now, and SOAs and the idea of enabling legacy applications to be deployed as services and orchestrated across platforms, is a key part of why BPEL is becoming a cornerstone of SOA.

“BPEL can enable SOAs to support your company’s changing business strategies and processes with fewer resources and less time. It’s gaining support from many large vendors.

“We are very excited about what BPEL brings to both the SOA and BPM spaces. We believe it’s set to revolutionize both those areas by providing the functionality that’s much-needed to enable enterprise deployment.

“BPEL is emerging as the standard for composing multiple services into collaborative and transactional business processes.

“This move toward service-oriented computing is something that isn’t new in the industry. There have been a number of previous attempts to provide SOAs. The difference is the enablers this time around: the standards, the ability to provide platform independence, to make these services more consumable, more reusable, and to completely extract them from the data that’s underlying them, so if that data structure changes, or if that application changes, you’re not affecting your business process. Another difference: the ability to make these services part of larger repositories so they’re easily discoverable.”