We are developing an application that communicates, via web services or TCP/IP sockets, with multiple servers (up to 50 different external companies). Basically, the exchanged messages are the same (XML), but depending on the inputs of our application we should call 1 or more external servers. The benefits we would expect of introducing a Service Bus in the architecture would be:

1- Remove the need to manage all point-to-point configurations (all the 50 endpoints);

2- Simplify the communication layer of our application by having only one server to talk to;

Is a Service Bus a good architectural option for this scenario? What is the best (simplest) Service Bus for this kind of communication?

I read a few MSDN articles on Azure Service Bus Relay, but it didn’t seem to fit our needs. Am I wrong?

Thanks for your help.