Companies are increasingly being viewed as large collections of individual business areas whose relationships to each other are subject to constant change as is the question of which areas should be insourced and which outsourced. The extended enterprise has become reality. Consortiums, joint ventures, mergers – some just for the duration of a specific project – are becoming the order of the day in much the same way as corporate spin-offs. The IT structures that have grown over the years are less and less able to deal with the resulting complexity and, above all, the high level of continual change in organizational and process structures. The possibility of changing from the traditional application-oriented approach to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is now being discussed as a way of finding a better solution to these tasks and overcoming rigidities – also, and in particular, in the product development process.