Sonic Software, an operating unit of Progress Software, has released Actional 6.0, the latest release of a management platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Actional 6.0 introduces business process visibility (BPV), a business process-centric approach to SOA visibility and management. It allows business and IT users to gain a comprehensive view of individual business processes and their supporting business services and IT infrastructure, while simultaneously enforcing policies at the business process level.
Unlike previous generations of SOA management, which provide only infrastructure-centric management of discrete services, Actional 6.0 allows organisations to discover end-to-end business processes as they execute individual business transactions, and then to manage the SOA from a business process-centric perspective, as well as manage individual business services.
"As SOA evolves as a key competitive factor for enterprises, SOA visibility and governance become business imperatives. Yet most organisations are flying blind when it comes to managing their SOA environments," says Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa.
"Actional 6.0 brings SOA management to the next level, enabling organisations to take control of their SOA by providing visibility from a business perspective and delivering true end-to-end governance."
Additional major functionality in Actional 6.0 includes automated runtime governance, which provides auto discovery and auto enforcement of policies for services and processes, and "Trust Zones" security to prevent unauthorised or non-compliant usage of services, deterring potential attacks in the SOA network. Actional 6.0 also delivers a new Web-based graphical user interface (GUI), enhanced standards support, and an expanded range of platform support.
Key capabilities in Actional 6.0:
* Business process visibility
Actional 6.0 allows organisations to create "business flow maps". These are derived from actual transactions which show how each process utilises individual services and their supporting IT infrastructure.
It also allows business users to customise a business activity monitoring (BAM) dashboard to report critical business indicators such as units shipped, time from order-to-cash or average order size, based directly on business processes as they execute. IT users gain access to key operational metrics such as failed transactions or service availability for the same business processes.
* Automated runtime governance
Actional 6.0 solves a fundamental issue facing virtually every production SOA deployment: rogue services and processes that can introduce operational and security risks. It is the first SOA management platform to address this problem by automatically discovering services, including rogue services, the instant they are deployed, and automatically enforcing applicable business, IT and security policies. As a result, businesses can significantly reduce the risk associated with rogue services and processes and dynamically bring them into alignment with defined policies.
Additionally, Actional 6.0 is fully integrated with UDDI v.3 service registries, such as the recently released Systinet 2. This capability allows organisations to define a "closed loop" process for end-to-end SOA governance, ensuring not only that defined policies are enforced at runtime, but also that runtime realities are accurately reflected in the registry.
Additional Actional 6.0 enhancements
* New Web-based GUI - optimised for managing enterprise SOAs with thousands of services, with an enhanced AJAX-based UI.
* Standards support - dynamic security policy support for consumers and providers based on WS-Policy, WS-SecurityPolicy and WS-MetaDataExchange; and support for WS-ReliableMessaging.
* Extended platform support - includes monitoring for SAP Netweaver, Cisco AON, and Sonic ESB. Also includes an SDK for developing monitoring points for custom stacks and applications.
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