The potential of the service-oriented enterprise is huge. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) will simplify the building, managing, and maintaining of distributed systems, in part because the technologies you will use to build these new systems are standards-based, thanks to the collaborative efforts of companies like IBM BEA, and Microsoft. Working together has enabled them to establish many Web services specifications, including WS-Security, WS-Addressing, and WS-Policy.

In this article I will focus on one Web services specification that is critical, yet has been largely overlooked: the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL).

I will describe why BPEL is important and what it offers you if you are implementing Web services today or planning to in the future. I'll also present concrete examples using BizTalk® Server 2004.