Actional Announces Update to Web Services Management Platform; SOAPstation Version 4.1 Adds Deployment Tools, Management of XML Services, and Intelligent Clustering Support.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 22, 2003

Actional Corporation, the Web services management market-share leader, today announced the general availability of an update to its SOAPstation(TM) Web service broker. The new version, Actional SOAPstation 4.1, includes sophisticated tools to seamlessly integrate management policy deployment into the application development lifecycle; functionality enabling the management of legacy XML-based services and accelerating the transition of those services to Web service standards; and intelligent clustering capabilities driving greater scalability and redundancy in mission-critical Web service networks.

"Actional has taken a unique approach to Web services management," stated Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink. "Unlike other Web services management solutions, which require an enterprise-wide roll out to achieve a positive ROI, Actional enables customers to take a phased approach that yields positive ROI at every step. Application development groups creating Web services can implement SOAPstation at the project level. Later, the operations team can benefit from the deployment of Actional Looking Glass. Actional's products thus lower the risk and increase the value of building service-oriented architectures."

Integrating Management in the Application Development Lifecycle

Actional SOAPstation 4.1, features a new set of tools for developers to more tightly integrate Web services management directly into their application development processes. These tools automate the movement of management policy between development, test and production servers, automatically updating environmental variables that can change across staging environments. In addition, SOAPstation 4.1 management policy files can now be checked-in and managed by source code control systems alongside the application logic defining service behavior.

XML Support, Broadens Management Reach and Speeds Web Services Adoption

Actional SOAPstation 4.1 also provides support for managing XML services created and deployed prior to the introduction of Web service standards such as SOAP and WSDL. This helps organizations that are adopting SOA as their application architecture to embrace and extend legacy XML services into a well-managed service infrastructure. SOAPstation provides comprehensive management support for these legacy services, without any service modification. Further, SOAPstation can transform these services to standard Web services, ensuring they have the broadest base of potential use.

Improved Scalability, Fault Tolerance for Mission-Critical Deployments

SOAPstation 4.1 is designed to deploy in a clustered configuration in support of high-volume, high-demand application architectures required in industries such as banking, financial services, retail and telecom. Organizations can deploy multiple instances of SOAPstation across their application environment, enabling virtually unlimited scalability, management of transaction volume, and fault-tolerant redundancy -- all of which ensure ongoing availability and performance of key Web services. Managing SOAPstation clusters is simplified through SOAPstation 4.1's ability to automatically propagate updates. When a policy change is made in any single SOAPstation instance, other cluster members reflect that change immediately and dynamically.

"Organizations will never enjoy the cost and flexibility benefits of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) until they have secured it and brought it under management," said James Phillips, chief strategist and senior vice president of Actional Corporation. "With SOAPstation 4.1 we are further extending our technology lead in the Web services management market, providing key capabilities that enable our customers to more quickly achieve payback from their Web services implementations."

About Actional SOAPstation

Actional SOAPstation is an active Web Services Broker that acts as a proxy, brokering the interactions between applications providing Web services and the systems that build on them. It delivers life-cycle management, including point-and-click facilities to manage service upgrades, roll-backs and retirements; fine-grained access control (both credential- and business rules-based); robust and configurable logging, alerting, auditing and reporting of service activity; service provisioning -- bridging differences in protocols, security models, data formats and service variants; and the ability to apply global in-flight message processing policy.

About Actional Corporation

Actional is the Web services management market-share leader, committed to helping organizations avoid the cost and complexity of unmanaged Web services deployments. With proven experience at more than 100 Global 2000 customer sites, the company builds the management foundation required to harness the cost and performance benefits promised by Web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Actional's solutions provide unmatched visibility, flexibility and active control across an enterprise Web services network -- ensuring uptime while dramatically reducing the costs of ongoing Web services management.