Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step ...

50 Chapter 3 Defining the Clouds for the Enterprise
You can think of processes as a sequence of events that must occur in a certain
order, leveraging any number of services and portions of data. For example,
Process “Ship Product”
1. Transmit order to warehouse.
2. Process shipping provider.
3. Price shipping.
4. Turn over to shipping provider.
5. Track shipment.
6. Report to customer.
Each step above includes services called by the process, but the services
themselves are not processes. Processes provide control instructions about
how to do something using many resources that can exist on-premise or in
the clouds. Processes can span a single enterprise or, more often, many enterprises
when dealing with process-as-a-service (see Figure 3.6).
Process engines are really nothing new, although the existence of process
engines on demand is. As we move forward with cloud computing, the use of
process engines to leverage and manage any number of local and remote services
to form them into business solutions will be an important component
to cloud computing and to SOA using cloud computing.
Process-as-a-Service
Company A
Company B
Company C
Figure 3.6 Process-as-a-service allows you to create common processes that
span many companies, cloud services, and on-premise services.