What is BPEL? How does it relate to Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA)?
There is a constant pressure for businesses to interconnect their applications. This is what is driving the adoption of web services and SOA as an enterprise blue print for reducing the cost and complexity of integration initiatives. Making web services work is a two-step process: first you publish and then you orchestrate. Publish means taking a part of a existing system and exposing it as a service. Orchestrate means composing multiple discrete services into an end-to-end process flow. BPEL is the industry standard for orchestration.