Methods, apparatus, and products for stateful business application processing in an otherwise stateless service-oriented architecture (‘SOA’), the SOA including SOA services where each SOA service carrying out a processing step of the business application, where the stateful business application processing includes: configuring each service of the SOA to record state information describing the state of the service upon completion of a processing step in the business application and provide the state information to a subsequent service; and executing the business application in the SOA, including sending requests for data processing among the services, each such request including a specification of the state of the executing business application.