The Extended Enterprise is a concept that promotes the use of application level communications between companies to enable near real-time integration. Thus, applications at one company become extensions to the applications at their trading partners and vice-versa.

The Extended Enterprise leverages the Service Network as infrastructure to move information between parties. In addition, Business Dialects are used to give the transmitted data a context. These dialects may leverage a process orchestration (or web service orchestration) language to enable conversations via long running transactions.