services that can be reused and combined to address changing business priorities. The interfaces are defined to be standardized and independent of hardware platform, operating system, and the programming language in which the service is implemented. This enables them to quickly and flexibly exchange structured information about business events, including messages, documents, and "business objects. This flexibility enables new and existing applications to be easily and quickly combined to address changing business needs, and the ability to easily combine and choreograph applications allows IT services to more readily reflect business processes. WebSphere Message Broker can be used in the implementation of an SOA because it provides a mechanism for connecting, routing, and transforming business data from a variety of transports without the need to change the underlying applications generating the data. The method in which WebSphere Message Broker is used in application integration and SOA is described in detail in the next few sections. 2.1.2 Message-Oriented Middleware Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) enables applications to package their business information as messages, which are handled by the MOM, for example