How are you planning to integrate between remedy and middleware? If you use webservices to talk to middleware, then your original issue still be there unless your transitional issues are related to be able to queue up and retry messages so that you wont loose transactions incase of connection issues etc..
Regardless I think it is a good approach and will help you scale your remedy application. I think with 16 apps talking to remedy using webservices is worthwhile to look into middleware. We often times come across scenarios where external systems have to adhere to remedy web service limitations just because remedy did not have full feature set natively. In the same way remedy cannot use external systems web service directly without translations unless it is very plain and simple SOAP webservice. I have worked in several places where they used webmethods, tibco, custom java jms as their middleware. By introducing the middleware you can overcome majority of those limitations. These middleware tools are built for the very specific purpose so usually they are more versatile and support lot of features or standards that plain remedy web services cannot support. The middleware will abstract lot of tasks like SSL,Firewalls, corporate security standards, authentication etc... Usually corporate will have dedicated middleware teams with the know how and they will take care of those things. Also you get the added benefits like single point of contact, transactional persistence, queues and be able to hold and retry transactions incase of lost communication, logs etc... The only draw back I experienced was since you are introducing one more layer between remedy and external systems you have one more team to coordinate for changes or new deployments which could cause potentials delays to projects. Additional work of mapping to middle ware and one more failure point. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug12 www.wwrug12.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"