Business Transaction Assurance

Business Transaction Assurance—for More Revenue and Greater Productivity

Minimizing business loss or maximizing revenue and productivity starts with business transaction assurance. This may seem obvious, but it's not trivial. Every organization has mission-critical business processes, such as placing an order. These may originate with a customer or partner transaction and flow through a number of steps and human interactions. They are critical to success because an issue with a single step in a transaction process—such as a delayed or dropped order—means a revenue opportunity is lost, productivity decreases, or a customer commitment, such as a service-level agreement (SLA), isn't met.

Consequently, an organization needs to be able to assure business transaction run smoothly and efficiently. This is easier said than done—given the nature of today's critical applications.

Obstacles to Assuring Business Transaction Success

Today, the business-critical transactions typically rely on applications comprised of services that span systems, databases, and middleware from multiple vendors. These often reside often in different locations and are owned by different groups. As a result, assuring the success of transactions is difficult. For example:

• How can you get complete visibility into every step of the transaction and into the quality of service for different customers in this diverse infrastructure—and still have a low total cost of ownership (TCO)?
• How can you detect issues proactively before they occur, and when they happen, perform root cause analysis quickly before end users suffer inconvenience or business is interrupted?
• How can you align the IT infrastructure with business goals?

Without visibility into the end-to-end transaction and the ability to avoid problems or detect them quickly, you don't know if an application is slow, can't trace a failed on lost transaction, or can't assure quality of service for key customers and partners.

Just as important, for the IT infrastructure to support business objectives you need access to information on the business context of executing transactions in terms of various business dimensions: for example, how is a specific customer, customer segment, or region being served. In addition, you need to be able to dynamically optimize transaction execution based on this information, for example, to provide the best service to your key customers, partners, and channels.

Progress® Business Transaction Assurance

There is a way to successfully address these issues: a business transaction assurance solution powered by products. With Actional you can assure that business transactions execute smoothly and efficiently and are optimized to support business goals. Specifically with Actional,

• You gain end-to-end visibility into service-level performance and availability and across heterogeneous environments. Actional's patented Flow Mapping technology automatically discovers individual services, service consumers, and upstream and downstream dependencies. Actional also alerts when user-defined policies for performance and availability thresholds are violated. When an alert occurs, you can also drill into any part of the network (see below) to see greater detail on a service and its operations –to perform root cause analysis quickly. You don't waste time and resources troubleshooting in the wrong place.
• You can better understand the business value of each transaction and dynamically optimize service delivery to ensure that the most important customers, partners, or channels always have the best services. Actional provides information on a variety of business dimensions on real-time transactions as well as on historical patterns and trends. Based on this information you can create policy to dynamically optimize SOA operations and service delivery to support the business. For example, you can create a policy that automatically prioritizes service to your premier customers during peak service load times.
• You can accelerate business decision making with dimensional analysis tools for manipulating data and viewing historical patterns and rules—to improve your processes and adjust IT operations to meet changing needs.

In short, by ensuring that business transactions execute reliably and efficiently and minimizing downtime, you can, respectively capitalize on revenue opportunities and increase user satisfaction. And by prioritizing service to key users, you can even fine-tune business transaction execution to maximize revenue opportunities and differentiate your organization in the eyes of customers. But that's not all,

Business Transaction Success with Lower TCO

Actional’s ability to automatically discover all steps in an end-to-end transaction dramatically reduces the amount of coding or configuration required. This, in turn, decreases the cost and time-of development—both of getting up and running and of making changes—reducing the time-to-value of your business processes.

What's more, Actional family products have a unique architecture that enables end-to-end monitoring with little overhead—only microseconds of latency per network node, for high-performance with cost-effective scaling. Actional also distributes policy enforcement on the network, so the management server is never a bottleneck and can support more than 1000 managed systems.

That means you get business transaction assurance and continuous service delivery optimization for a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).