We must bring together the worlds of SOA, BPM, Cloud, REST, and HOA. The secret to getting all these architectural trends to work well together centers on how we deal with state information. We must first separate application state from resource state, and then subsequently take the conceptual leap to understanding that the best way to implement our business processes is by combining HOA processes with Composite RESTful Services. Once we make this leap, however, the pieces of this complicated puzzle finally fall into place.
What we need is a better way of dealing with state information that both allows our BPM engines to be Cloud friendly, and also frees us from the limitations of our ESBs. Or perhaps we must reinvent our ESBs to work in the Cloud. However you slice the problem, Hypermedia-Oriented Architecture (HOA) has the answer.