Progress Actional for Continuous Service Optimization

Unprecedented Business Insight—for Smarter Decisions

Progress® Actional® for Continuous Service Optimization (CSO) ensures alignment between business and IT by enabling organizations to directly measure, prioritize, and optimize SOA service delivery based on business goals. It provides both business insight into SOA operations for making and prioritizing IT decisions and integrated runtime controls for continuously optimizing business outcomes.

Actional's Flow Mapping™ technology relates business process execution to the underlying SOA IT activity without manual modeling. It captures service levels, process metrics like order-to-fulfillment times, and key business indicators and presents them for simultaneous viewing and analysis on a differentiated basis: by individual customer, customer class or group, region, division, or any other custom dimension.

Actional also provides policy-based controls for changing SOA behavior, either manually or automatically, when required to optimize service delivery to key customers. In this way it helps to ensure quality of service and enhance the customer experience.

Actional for Continuous Service Optimization provides an integrated view of business and IT metrics as they relate to underlying IT topology for complete IT and business alignment. (Click on image to enlarge)

Highlights

• Offers visibility and insight into the customer experience—by generating multi-dimensional business metrics and analytics related to runtime operations
• Provides integrated runtime controls for automatically or manually optimizing service delivery, ensuring the most important customers receive the best service
• Assures—via end-to-end business process visibility—that no process steps are missed or transactions are lost in long-running processes spanning both manual and automated activities
• Provides user-configurable, browser-based dashboards with SOA performance data and business metrics in easy-to-understand graphical formats and management-friendly reports

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 for Continuous Service Optimization 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.

For additional questions on Actional products, please contact us.