Patent ID: 7395540

Claim:
A method of operating a plurality of business software components, the method comprising: discovering information about a first stand-alone business software application, the first business software application having at least one first component capability or first component requirement; binding the at least one first component capability or first component requirement to a first role in a model-driven bus; discovering information about a second stand-alone business software application, the second business software application having at least one second component capability or second component requirement; providing standardized messaging between the first and second stand-alone business software applications wherein the first and second stand-alone business software applications interact with the model-driven bus in the form of a publisher/subscriber model; binding the at least one second component capability or second component requirement to a second role in a model-driven bus; wherein at least one capability of the first stand-alone business software application overlaps at least one capability of the second stand-alone business software application and wherein the model-driven bus provides arbitration such that only one of the first and second stand-alone business software applications provides the overlapping capability; and examining role bindings to determine if a business process can be enabled.