SOA pinpoints links between services and business processes

Progress Software says its Actional suite of service-oriented architecture (SOA) management software offers new 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, increased visibility, governance, and security are even more important,” says Dan Foody, a Progress Software VP, adding that a new release of Actional comprises the only SOA management solution that provides visibility and control spanning both business process management solutions (BPM) and an SOA infrastructure across an enterprise.

This complete visibility comes via integration with Lombardi Software's TeamWorks BPM solution.

Foody said Actional 7.1 provides BPM users and SOA architects with these capabilities:

• 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 always remains clear.
• Insight to 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 without knowing the complete set of services that support the process.