Actional In The News:

01/29/2008 — Progress Actional 7.1 SOA Management Product Family Released — With this release, Actional is the only SOA management solution that provides visibility and control spaning both BPM solutions and an SOA infrastructure across an enterprise. Learn more about this and other new features.

01/27/2008 — Progress Software views BPM with Actional SOA tool — Progress Software is launching Progress Actional 7.1 SOA management platform, featuring visibility across business processes and into related services and IT infrastructure.

11/28/2007 — Advice for Writing a Useful SOA RFP — According to blogger Loraine Lawson, "If you’ve written – or are preparing to write – a SOA-related RFP, you might want to start by reading what David Bressler has to say about keeping it simple."

11/14/2007 — Interview: Dan Foody, Progress Software — A lively discussion of SOA governance with veteran SOA technologist, Dan Foody.

10/22/2007 — 10 Tools to Manage SOA — Vendors step up to address the governance, quality and management technology triangle that ensures successful implementation.

09/19/2007 — SOA Visionaries — This podcast explains why and when companies need SOA and Web services management and how Actional provides it without bottlenecks or service latency.

05/02/2007 — Progress extends Sonic ESB 7.5 with BPEL server, SOA management — Progress Software this week released Sonic ESB 7.5, an update to the innovative enterprise service bus that adds a BPEL process orchestration server and integrates with Progress Actional, the company's SOA monitoring and management solution.

04/19/2007 — Tricky Business: Building Fault-Tolerant Web Services — Building Web services and SOAs requires nothing less than a complete and thorough review and re-engineering of IT systems environments, from storage media and databases to servers and networks, to end-user applications.

04/12/2007 — SOA's Hidden Danger — Bad things can happen when SOA systems aren't centrally monitored and managed. Developers throughout a company can create unauthorized Web services that tap into an SOA system, and that can lead to all kinds of nasty surprises.

12/05/2006 — Progress Actional supports Oracle, JBoss — New Actional Ghost Agents for Oracle and JBoss work in conjunction with Actional's Looking Glass product, together offering business-process visibility across SOA environments through discovery of services, service callers, and end-to-end business transactions.

11/30/2006 — Governance not keeping up with SOA adoption — SOA Governance survey reveals that governance is not keeping pace with the adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) within most companies.

10/24/2006 — The Challenges of SOA — The more an organization moves towards a service-based architecture, the more difficult the challenges become. Dan Foody, CTO for Sonic and Actional products, outlines the "blind spots" organizations have to get past to surmount the challenges.

10/17/2006 — SOA: It's the Business that Matters — On the subject of SOA, Dave Chappell, vice president and chief technology evangelist for Sonic products, says "You are putting an architecture in place that will be pervasive across your enterprise and is going to prevail for many years to come. Make sure you do the proper planning to align SOA with the needs of your business. Build flexible business processes that can accommodate future changes and ensure that the proper governance measures and business policy enforcement are in place for rapid adoption of SOA." Read the complete article for his recommendations for implementing SOA.

10/12/2006 — SOA worst practices, lots of Web services = trouble — "Dan Foody, CTO for Sonic Software and Actional products at Progress Software Corp., is seeing SOA failures based on what he considers SOA worst practices. Although he is a chief technology officer, he does not see the problem as technological. In his opinion, the problem is with the management of the projects, lack of understanding of the SOA approach and the inability of organizations to make the shifts needed to embrace the SOA philosophy."

10/06/2006 — Web Services Management: For Shared Apps, a Private Eye — IDC says that the market for Web services systems infrastructure was 1.02 billion in 2005, and is predicted to go to 3.91 billion by 2009. And if you're working with Web services, you'll certainly need to manage them, as California ISO did when they used [Progress Actional] SOAPstation to set up four monitoring end-points on each service in a matter of minutes. They reported that before Actional, "...setting up similar testing and governance capabilities went something like this: Take our 150 services, multiply by four [end-points], and then each one of those might take an hour to set up and test." Read the related stand-alone article, Actional: People Power to find out why Janet Park, director of architecture and systems integration for Starwood Hotels said "performance was one of the attributes they [Actional] talked about as a differentiator. They delivered what they claimed."

10/06/2006 — The need for IT governance — Jason Stamper assesses the need for IT governance software, and asks how it can help the IT department to demonstrate its own value to the business. Jason interviews Dan Foody, Sonic and Actional Products CTO, who says "In order to implement a complete approach to SOA governance, you need to consider the roles of development, deployment, and runtime governance.

09/07/2006 — Sometimes, SOA means 'letting go' — Sonic and Actional Products CTO, Dan Foody, opines about "...turf battles over control of various aspects of services being rendered via an SOA-enabled infrastructure", because "when it comes to service-oriented architecture, the prevailing assumption is that IT will be talking and working in synch with the rest of the business. However, IT tends to be a pretty diverse group in and of itself -- will IT people be talking and working in synch with other IT people?"

09/01/2006 — Teams embrace all-inclusive SOA — Ann Bednarz interviews Sonic and Actional products' CTO, Dan Foody, as she explores the kinds of people you need on the team that will build an SOA. "Application developers, data architects, security specialists and IT directors all have a stake in the design of application services and the enterprise framework across which they run. Network executives are no exception."

08/23/2006 — 10-step Program to SOA Success — Dave Chappell, vice president and chief technology evangelist for Sonic products, lays out what he calls: "... the 10-step program to SOA success ... The most rewarding thing for me is when I get a chance to engage in, and facilitate a conversation with, a room of people that includes those who have successfully completed SOA projects. Listening to these "pioneers" share their experiences, both positive and negative, with those still trying to figure out SOAs is an eye-opening experience."

08/01/2006 — SOA Governance and Rogue Services — Actional's Dan Foody writes: In order to implement a complete approach to SOA governance, you need to consider the roles of development, deployment, and runtime governance. Taking a holistic view of governance across the life cycle will automate as much of the governance burden as possible, while providing a backstop to catch the rogue services and service-uses that your human-centric processes don’t catch. Of course, there’s no perfect solution – the human element still plays a key role. In order to reduce risk, you need to reduce the complexity of the manual processes – so remember to think strategically about which rules are really necessary, and which are just "nice to have."

06/07/2006 — Rogue services lurk in SOA — Rich Seeley, News Writer for SearchWebServices writes: Rogue services could be the killer app in SOA … but not in a good way. Rogue services are killers in the Soprano's sense of the term, not the cute ironic buzz word sense popularized by software industry marketing mavens.

03/29/2006 — Actional 6.0 Broadens SOA View — SoftwareMag.com, the IT Software Journal writes: Securing, governing and managing SOA environments just became easier with Actional 6.0, the latest SOA management technology release from Sonic Software, Bedford, Mass. Version 6.0 introduces Business Process Visibility (BPV), which offers users a comprehensive view of individual business processes and their supporting business services and IT infrastructure... The product aims to align IT with business by improving business efficiency, reducing risk and resolving problems faster and easier.

02/27/2006 — Actional enhances SOA management platform — InfoWorld's Paul Krill writes: 'Business process visibility,' finding of rogue services are among the improvements in Version 6.0 of its Actional SOA and Web services management platform. Users also can view metrics around business processes such as how many are running and how many are failing. Business processes can be examined from both business and IT perspectives.

01/23/2006 — Reactivity and Actional Bring Secure Web Services and SOA to Thomson Prometric — Christopher Crowhurst, Vice President and Chief Architect of Thomson Learning says: The ease with which Thomson Prometric was able to use the Reactivity Gateway to secure the largest testing system in the world is a great example of SOA in action and it resulted in cost savings of several million dollars in development and deployment costs. Actional’s WS Management product is allowing us to control and monitor our SOA as we bring partners seamlessly into the Thomson Prometric testing network while at the same time reducing integration costs.

01/01/2006 — Service-Oriented Architectures: Tool time for service-oriented architectures — Alan Radding, Reporter for ADTMag writes: Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide is following an SOA strategy to move from mainframe systems inherited from its mergers to a new open systems environment. The goal is to eliminate the mainframes. The result will be a complex SOA environment that Starwood expects to handle high volumes ... The company opted for Actional's SOA management tools.