Web services, grid computing, and business process management: exploiting complementarities for business agility

Recent technologies including Web services, business process modeling tools, and grid computing, are key to facilitating business agility. Web services standardize application interfaces to ease inter-application communication, and facilitate standards based business process management. Grid computing provides a way for virtualizing heterogeneous resources to collectively yield a computationally powerful IT environment with tremendous promise in improving utilization levels of individual IT resources. By leveraging Web services, a standards based grid is being envisaged in the OGSA model. In this paper, we explore the complementarities of Web services and business process management (BPM) technologies. We also lay the foundation for using Web services based BPM in solving orchestration and workflow issues in grid computing.