SOA is sold as an opportunity for the business to review its essential functions and for IT to build those functions through technology. The technology implementation is thought to be straightforward; services do not create new functionality but simply wrap existing functionality.

Vendor platforms promote the idea of services as processes. Use cases are process-oriented, so it's not unexpected to see process-oriented characteristics in an SOA implementation. Even a service whose job is to make a single backend call requires several steps (for error handling, logging, transactional boundaries, and so on), and is itself a small process. Vendors tell organizations not to code such complexity in a third-generation language such as Java. Organizations agree, and follow the process-oriented approach too.

The model stack, provided by the leading vendors, has BPM and SOA layers, and SOA is divided into process integration and ESB. This stack differs markedly from the CORBA-based architecture from the days of the Martian book.

SOA Cookbook teaches techniques in the modeling of orchestration processes, which belong to the process integration layer of the model stack.