Telecommunication services are often implemented to maintain their state in persistent storage. The application logic program then has no state variables of its own; it is seeded with a state depending on call context. Superficially, this contradicts the notion of extended state machines as they are defined by SDL-processes, where the state is part of the state machine. This paper presents an approach to separate state from program logic that is transparent to the SDL designer. This approach has been implemented in the SITE SDL runtime system in co-operation with Siemens, Berlin.