Actional In The News: Archive

12/26/2005 — How To Implement A Successful SOA Pilot Program — Dan Foody writes: Every project will have its own unique business justifications and associated measurements. For example, exposing customer information via a service in order to create a self-service customer portal may be used to significantly reduce call center operations costs. These benefits will, of course, differ for each project. Even if you define a formal SOA pilot project, don't do this for the sake of moving to SOA - the project should provide value to the business.

12/14/2005 — XML Acceleration: The Truth Behind the Myths — Dan Foody writes: Every project will have its own unique business justifications and associated measurements. For example, exposing customer information via a service in order to create a self-service customer portal may be used to significantly reduce call center operations costs. These benefits will, of course, differ for each project. Even if you define a formal SOA pilot project, don't do this for the sake of moving to SOA - the project should provide value to the business.

09/05/2005 — SOA and ESB Are More Than Different Answers to the Same Problem — Dan Foody Writes: ESB is designed assuming a world of horizontal layers and dedicated special-purpose tools and teams. SOA is designed for a world of vertical slices, where every project team is empowered to immediately and directly solve its problems using whatever tools are appropriate, but with controls so that, even though the project teams think they're directly connecting to other applications, the infrastructure under the covers is taking care of quality of service, security, reliability -- automatically and seamlessly. ESB and SOA both provide answers to the problem of organizational control and growth of integration, but in radically different ways. The choice your IT organization needs to make is whether to organize itself around horizontal layers of special-purpose infrastructure or around vertical slices of business processes and initiatives.

07/25/2005 — Web Services Mature, See More B2B Transaction Use — IDG Computerworld's Heather Havenstein writes: Buoyed by improved technology and maturing standards, many IT operations are ramping up efforts to extend the use of Web services from application integration projects to ones involving business-to-business transactions ... By March 2006, Starwood plans to begin moving its 700 hotels to the new reservation system while boosting the number of Web services it has in production from 60 to 150. Conophy said Starwood will use a Web services broker and a centralized control console tool from Actional Corp. in Mountain View, Calif., to replace homegrown tools cobbled together two years ago.

07/21/2005 — Starwood Hotels Migration From Mainframe To SOA — InformationWeek Reporter Charles Babcock writes: [Starwood's] staff test drove tools from Actional, AmberPoint, and SOA Software. Eighteen months ago, none of the vendors' tools would have met his criteria. "The overhead was too high and the functionality was missing." Now, Starwood ended up choosing Actional's SOAPstation XML routing and monitoring tool and Looking Glass Server management console. The Actional tools added only 50 milliseconds of delay to the services' performance.

07/20/2005 — Starwood nears end of SOA revamp — Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service reports: To build its system, Starwood is relying on an assortment of third-party software -- the kind of best-of-breed approach that's fallen out of favor as companies wrestle with integration challenges. Starwood runs middleware from JBoss Inc. and IBM Corp.'s WebSphere line, an Oracle Corp. database, its own custom CRM software, and Unica Corp.'s marketing analytics tools, among others. This week, after a two-month search, Starwood announced its selection of Actional Corp.'s Looking Glass and SOAPstation software for managing data flow within its SOA. Conophy also evaluated products from SOA Software Inc. and AmberPoint Inc., but went with Actional after pilot tests showed lower latency and greater ease-of-use with its software.

06/01/2005 — Breaking down bureaucracy — Leung Wai Man, Reporter for MIS writes: The Hong Kong government successfully implemented US-based middleware supplier Actional's service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology to run its online services exchange. SOA is a method that involves loosely coupling software and services to the hardware, operating system and network. It allows Web-based applications to dynamically interact with other applications using open standards such as XML, UDDI and SOAP. Data exchange between departments and subsidiaries or with external clients is easily achieved, and changes made to the software cost much less than they would normally because they can be instituted independently of the existing hardware and operating systems.

05/19/2005 — Is SOA a development delight and an operations nightmare? — Peter Abrahams of Bloor Research writes: Actional recognised to provide operational monitoring and control that recognises and supports SOA environments and has been providing such functionality for several years. It has recently significantly enhanced these capabilities. Firstly, by merging with Westbridge to provide integrated SOA security, and more recently by the announcement of their latest release of Looking Glass which ... enables operations to turn a potential nightmare into a delight.

05/17/2005 — Actional takes a stand on security policy — Nitin Bharti, News Editor with SearchWebServices.com writes: On Monday, Web services management and security provider Actional Corp. unveiled version 5.5 of its management platform, aiming to help organizations gain more control over Web services security policy. The new product is comprised of the Looking Glass Management Server and Console and the SOAPstation Web services broker.

05/16/2005 — Actional Ramps Up Its Web Services Management Software — eWEEK's Paula Musich writes: In serving customers who are taking SOA projects beyond the pilot phase, [Actional has] added a laundry list of new features intended to help customers track transactions as they traverse non-SOA and non-XML environments, as they traverse multiple servers in a cluster, and as they slowly execute in asynchronous processes that can take days to complete.

04/11/2005 — InfoWorld CTO 25: Dan Foody — "A lot of people are afraid of change, but I like it because it's a new challenge all the time," says Dan Foody, CTO of Actional. Good thing. Three years ago Foody saw the need to dramatically change the direction of his company, which at the time developed point-to-point EAI adapters to connect big enterprise applications from players such as PeopleSoft and Siebel. Foody realized that approach wouldn’t scale -- and that Web services would change how people tied systems together. With that insight, he helped refocus the company on systems management rather than integration and on customer business challenges. "Not a single one of the products we sell today has any relation to what we sold three years ago," Foody says, referring to Actiona's current SOA Command and Control Platform. "My contribution was how to fundamentally change what the company’s DNA was."

03/24/2005 — Hong Kong Government Embraces SOA — ZDNet reports: Actional Corp. has joined HP Services and Getronics to deploy a new SOA-based e-government exchange that enables Hong Kong's citizens,producers andvariousgovernmentalagencies toeasily access and sharerelevant information. The exchange is now in production, and the security and XML infrastructure is in place to run it.