In his editorial “Reducing Service Complexity” at http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/the-soa-blog/reducing-service-complexity–33268?rss=1, Eric Roch speaks to how to implement services in a SOA environment - how to scale from 5 to 500 services without overly complicating your environment. I offer a solution from the people who pay me: Progress DataXtend SI. My assertion is that you should design your SOA services based on the natural APIs that are presented by the application you are looking to export. The tendency to push each application to a common model is high - the problem becomes when the common model no longer suffices, and you need to change or alter it. Instead of having one service to update, you have N services to update. What DataXtend SI offers is to allow the business analysts and developers the ability to take service offerings from any source, and map them to a common model. DataXtend SI does the hard work of mapping from your common model to your source data. In this fashion you can integrate SAP, and PeopleSoft from one interface.

DataXtend SI then supports deploying this engine to any of a number of Application servers and ESB Containers to facilitate your SOA needs.

Progress offers a significant amount of SOA governance and middleware products that reduce development effort and maintenance lifecycle costs.

http://www.progress.com