Service-orientation and object-oriented design are common practice in the field of business application development. Business process execution languages help to facilitate the orchestration of Web services in service-oriented architectures (SOA). However, using business processes from within object-oriented and event-driven applications is difficult as asynchronous event handling is missing in workflow-based business process modeling languages. The present article presents an approach for integrating BPEL business processes into object-oriented applications. We propose BPEL remote objects (BPELROs) that can be accessed asynchronously in an object-oriented manner. We present a method how state-based business processes can be implemented using BPELROs. It is shown how to apply BPELROs for software modernization tasks and we also evaluate the performance of BPELROs on different BPEL engines.