Exchange and Transformation with external apps

Hi,

This might come as a very vague question, but please bare with me.

We have external apps that presently communicate with Information Broker for data exchange and JCO on the SAP HR system to perform the data transformation using JCO (EJB).

So moving forward we would like to implement SOA and eleminate the use of JCO and EJB. Would like to achieve this thru some webservice that makes use of BAPI's. How can I do that in technical terms I mean, any brief or detailed tutorial will be fine.

Thanks for your patience.