Total control: New SOA suite pinpoints links between services and business processes
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 2/4/2008 10:47:00 AM
Progress Software claims the latest version of its Actional suite of service-oriented architecture (SOA) management software offers unprecedented ability to understand and manage the relationships between individual services and complete business processes.
"As SOA makes its way more deeply into the fabric of enterprise infrastructures, the ability to increase visibility, governance, and security becomes increasingly important,” Dan Foody, VP of Actional Products, Progress Software, said in a press release announcing the Actional 7.1 solution set. “With this release, Actional is the only SOA management solution on the market today that provides visibility and control that can span both BPM solutions and an SOA infrastructure across an enterprise."
This complete visibility comes via a built-in integrate with the Lombardi TeamWorks business process management (BPM) solution.
Foody said Actional 7.1 provides BPM users and SOA architects with:
• Visibility into the dependencies between the business process steps and other services so that, as either processes or services are versioned or changed, the impact of the changes is always clear. The Actional automatic discovery feature always keeps information accurate, even allowing users to compare how processes change from day-to-day.
• Insight into performance and behavior of BPM call-outs so as to uncover unexpected behavior and be able to quickly identify the root cause of problems affecting the business process. Users can set thresholds for alerts for process slow-downs, or assess how specific services are impacting the execution of the overall process.
• Control over process policies, allowing users to apply policies to processes (e.g., "audit all steps for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance") without having to know the complete set of services that support the process. And, as services or the process changes over time, the policy enforcement will automatically adjust with no manual re-configuration.
In addition to its integration with Lombardi TeamWorks, Progress is working to integrate Actional 7.1 with other BPM solutions, including those from Software AG and Fujitsu. Actional 7.1 also comes with a software developer’s kit that allows users to add support for other BPM or SOA infrastructure products.
