SOA Quality of Service—through Service Delivery Optimization

Once companies can control SOA operations, they can turn their attention to ensuring SOA quality of service. By choosing the right SOA management technology, companies can align processes with business goals to optimize SOA service delivery.

SOA Quality of Service: What You Need to Know and Why

With traditional management tools, IT can determine the average response time of services. But that information doesn't really reveal how individual customers are being serviced by an SOA.

Knowledge of how particular customers are actually being served is important because not all customers are created equal. Companies have preferred customers, usually those who are more profitable. They also commit to various service-level agreements (SLAs) with different customers.

If companies can ensure top SOA quality of service to the best customers and provide different levels of service to customers based on their SLAs, they can align SOA operations with business needs. Beyond meeting business requirements, this SOA alignment can yield benefits such as improved customer satisfaction and greater customer profitability.

But how, in fact, can companies control and optimize service delivery?

Ensuring SOA Quality of Service

Progress® Actional® SOA management technology provides the information and tools to dynamically optimize SOA quality of services. Actional provides insight into how Web services and SOA business processes are being used by and performing for individual customers or customer segments.

What makes this possible? Actional creates both an infrastructure view and a business process view of each business process transaction. The infrastructure view is a flow map of an end-to-end SOA transaction: Actional automatically discovers and dynamically maps the interrelationships between systems as the actual transaction flows throughout the SOA.

At the same time, Actional also automatically provide information related to the quality of the service in the business process being executed for an individual customer. What's more, this capability is always on without introducing any overhead into the SOA system.

For example, in a business process involving order processing, this information can answers questions such as:

• What really occurs in ordering?
• How many orders are in production?
• How long does it take from order to delivery?
• Why has purchasing stalled?

This business process information ties the IT infrastructure flow map of a transaction to key business criteria, providing answers to questions such as:

• Are customers having problems with a business process?
• Is the business process keeping up with demand?
• Is the business process meeting commitments?

Actional business process views tie SOA infrastructure operations (shown in flow maps) to business criteria to enable service delivery optimization

By seeing what really happens as services are used in a differentiated fashion by various customers, companies can adjust their SOA IT infrastructure to optimize service delivery. For example, they can write SOA business rules that trigger at peak load times and give special service routing or preferential service usage to their most profitable customers or ensure that processes meet service delivery agreements.

In this way Actional can help enhance the customer experience, aligning the IT infrastructure with business needs.

For More Information on SOA Quality of Service

To find out more about what you need to optimize SOA performance and ensure SOA quality of service, download "Jumpstarting SOA in Your SAP Environment".