The dynamic SOA world, consisting of many component services that can be recombined and reused, gives rise to many potential SOA management issues and business risks. How can you monitor what's going on in the heterogeneous, distributed SOA environment, to find and resolve problems quickly? How can you know and ensure that your SOA business processes are delivering the right level of customer service? How can you guarantee that all services are secure and compliant with appropriate regulatory and business policies?

Progress® Actional® SOA management products address these questions and more. They provide operational and business visibility and policy-based security and control of services and end-to-end business processes in a heterogeneous runtime environment. Actional continuously optimizes services according to business requirements, ensures compliance with regulatory and security policy, and provides root cause analysis for effective issue resolution.

As a result, Actional is a key component of a service governance strategy, complementing in-place processes and other standards-based technologies. In addition, with Actional SOA Management products, you can begin to build an SOA and run it successfully today and evolve it incrementally to connect people, functions, and computing resources across, and beyond, enterprise boundaries.

Key capabilities include:

• Support for the entire SOA lifecycle. Actional includes solutions for effective management of all stages of SOA maturity. It includes features you benefit from immediately such as end-to-end monitoring, which is critical for development, quality assurance, and staging environments to ensure reliable SOA operation as well as other features that provide support as your SOA evolves.
• Policy-based, centralized SOA management. Actional provides centralized configuration and management of policies and distributed enforcement on the network. This allows appropriate experts, rather than developers, to define a policy once and apply it wherever relevant, for consistent enforcement. Actional also applies policies to end-to-end processes wherever they flow, allowing processes and services to change without requiring policy changes or re-applications, for lower IT overhead and cost.
• An architecture designed for high performance and scalability. Actional monitors and controls end-to-end SOA processes with only microseconds of latency on the network and without server bottlenecks. It requires less than two percent of CPU capacity per network node, and one Actional server can support more than 1,000 managed systems. That means you can build and scale an enterprise-class SOA cost-effectively.
• Unmatched integration and interoperability—for easy SOA deployment and evolution in the heterogeneous enterprise. Actional is built to easily integrate and interoperate with a wide variety of heterogeneous infrastructure such as applications, data sources, network devices, middleware, identity management products, and registries and repositories. Actional places great importance on supporting industry standards, to make this interoperability possible.

Progress Actional Products

Actional's comprehensive set of products solves the problems of SOA management.

Actional for SOA Operations

Provides end-to-end visibility across your SOA, accelerating problem resolution and mitigating the risk of SOA adoption.

Actional for Continuous Service Optimization

Provides business insight into SOA operations for making and prioritizing decisions and integrated runtime controls for continuously optimizing business outcomes. It enables you to align IT with your business.

Actional for Active Policy Enforcement

Ensures compliance with security and regulatory policy while reducing costs. It centralizes SOA policy creation and SOA policy management while providing consistent, distributed policy enforcement.

Actional Add-on: Governance Integration Module

The Governance Integration Module integrates with third-party governance products such as BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Registry Repository, Software AG's CentraSite Governance Edition, Fujitsu's and Software AG's CentraSite Enterprise Edition, and HP Systinet to control rogue services, share policy information, and augment registry service metadata with runtime service metadata. It automatically discovers rogue services and interrupts them, pending their review and approval--preventing possible breaches of security and regulatory compliance and their costly consequences, such as fines and litigation, as well as capacity overloads from unplanned services.

The Governance Integration Module also adds value to integrated registries and repositories by copying in metadata on actual service usage, performance, and interdependencies. This information helps developers understand the impact of SOA versioning and maintenance.

Technical Specifications

Actional supports a wide range of platforms and standards.

Product available May 24, 2007. For more information on purchases or upgrades, contact your local Progress office.

Effective with the Actional 7.0 release the "Looking Glass" and "SOAPstation" product names are retired. Relevant functionality from these products is now incorporated in various Actional products.