Progress Software, a provider of leading application infrastructure software to develop, deploy, integrate, and manage business applications, is about to release Actional 7, an SOA management platform that comprises a trio of products addressing the diversity of management needs in service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments.
The Actional SOA management product family provides best-in-class monitoring, analysis, security, and policy control, including system and process-level visibility, and policy enforcement across an SOA, the company said.
With Actional 7, Progress is actually introducing three new stand-alone products:
"Numerous SOA stakeholders work on separate schedules, follow different workflows, and have very diverse, but unique needs," said Dan Foody, vice president, Actional Products at Progress Software. "Ironically, most SOA management and governance vendors are moving towards offering one-size-fits-all monolithic platforms that are predominantly focused only on one group, often the service developers. The other SOA stakeholders are forced to compromise with a solution that either under-serves or over-complicates their requirements.
"For example, to provide the best security or visibility they must depend on service developers, whose priorities and timelines are rarely the same. Actional 7 offers a choice of best-in-class products that directly addresses the needs of each distinct SOA stakeholder."
According to Brad Shimmin, principal analyst, applications infrastructure, Current Analysis, "While it may seem counter-intuitive, the decision to move to a service-oriented architecture is not always driven across the entire company as a single initiative. Often, the initial reason for pursuing a SOA solution is based on the needs of a single department, or driven by the goals of a single project, yet future enterprise needs and scalability are still a concern. Progress Software has recognized this trend and is addressing it with the latest iteration of its Actional SOA management platform and its three stand-alone SOA modules."
Each Actional product can be deployed independently to address the needs of a specific SOA audience or combined to accomplish multiple goals. They also work in concert with complementary SOA products such as application platforms, ESBs, registries, repositories, and security appliances, as well as testing and development tools.
Actional for SOA Operations
This product addresses the needs of teams that own shared SOA infrastructure and common services. These teams are rarely responsible for building services and do not have the intimate knowledge of how they work, however they are responsible for ensuring their organizations' end-to-end applications are functioning correctly for all consumers. Only Actional for SOA Operations can automatically discover and correlate process flows across multiple tiers and technologies. This is the key to bridging the knowledge gap between service developers and shared infrastructure teams.
Actional for Continuous Service Optimization
This product addresses the needs of service owners and service providers. These teams recognize that their success is measured continuously by optimizing the business value they deliver, and judge their services from a business context; for example, whether service level agreements (SLAs) are being met, key business indicators are positive, or that multi-step and long-running, end-to-end, business processes are operating within expectations. Only Actional for Continuous Service Optimization can relate the execution of an end-to-end business process to underlying services, even as the process changes.
Actional for Active Policy Enforcement
This product addresses the needs of SOA security and compliance teams. Historically, service developers were responsible for implementation because they knew the details of the services necessary to enforce real-world policies û yet this led to inconsistent enforcement of policies, increasing cost and risk. The combination of central policy authoring, business-level policy definition, and the ability to upgrade policy on live services with no failed transactions, is a unique feature of Actional for Active Policy Enforcement. Actional is the first product to fully separate the lifecycle of SOA security and compliance policy from the service development lifecycle, which allows SOA security and compliance teams to own the implementation of the policies from end-to-end.
"Given the stringent security and privacy requirements in healthcare, we can't take risks when it comes to managing compliance," said Hong Lou, associate director, application development, Partners Healthcare. "With Actional for Active Policy Enforcement our security team can enforce policy consistently across our infrastructure, letting us focus and simplify the skill-set of our application developers."
Availability
Actional 7 ships on May 24th. Pricing starts at $20,000.
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