In this chapter, we looked at the relation between SOA and business processes. We saw that SOA and BPM are closely related. SOA provides the technology platform for the implementation of business processes, and the development of applications that provide end-to-end support for business processes. SOA is an architecture that has introduced several important new concepts into application development. One of the most important concepts is the composition of services into business processes. With this, SOA has provided an architecture that is flexible enough to accommodate business needs related to agility, adaptability, along with other aspects related to the optimization of operations and improvement of business process efficiency.

We have seen that we have to look at SOA from three different perspectives: business, technical, and organizational. Only if we address SOA from all the three can we minimize the risks and maximize the benefits of SOA inception. The benefits are: improved flexibility, better alignment of IT and business, faster and simplified application development with reduced complexity, and most importantly, end-to-end automation of business processes, and a reduced semantic gap between business and IT. Risks are related to various organizational, technology, and business issues, which we also discussed in this chapter.

We learned that SOA is a long-term project connected with business processes and BPM. This is important because it means that we have to understand business processes in order to be able to use SOA for their implementation. Therefore, in the next chapter, we will look at how we should manage and model business processes for SOA.