An orchestration engine is a server that is responsible for acting as an intelligent intermediary between services. The interaction that occurs between scripts is defined in ‘orchestration scripts’. These scripts are then fed into the orchestration engine where they are executed.

Orchestration engines participate in the service network. They are used to integrate internal applications as well as to facilitate the Extended Enterprise. Some engines will be specific to an orchestration language like BPEL4WS while others will support multiple orchestration languages.