Actional Launches Advanced Web Services Management Platform; Actional SOAPstation Addresses Critical Need for Secure Web Services Distribution.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Web Services Edge West 2002 Conference

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 30, 2002

Actional Corporation, an emerging leader in Web services management, today introduced Actional SOAPstation, the industry's most advanced Web Services Management Platform. With Actional SOAPstation, companies can now transform loose collections of Web services into secure, manageable, and highly valuable business assets.

Web services help enterprises more quickly build new internal business systems or connections to partners, suppliers and customers. Business Web services increase in value as more business systems or partner connections are created. Paradoxically, widely leveraging a Web service over many systems and partners can also dramatically increase both cost and complexity. As companies mature in their Web services efforts, they inevitably recognize their need for solutions that manage the intricacies of controlling the distribution of those services.

"Many enterprises are taking steps to incorporate Web services into their IT infrastructures, but in reality most efforts today are focused on ad hoc Web services creation, with little consideration of the weightier issue of how to manage them," said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. "With the launch of Actional SOAPstation, Actional is targeting what is clearly the next critical need for customers deploying Web services -- a powerful management, security and distribution platform."

Actional SOAPstation addresses the need for managed Web service distribution by providing organizations with a unified point of control for Web service provisioning, version management, business activity monitoring, and end-to-end security across the entire Web services network. Actional SOAPstation enables companies to manage any changes to the Web services network without disruption, allowing them to enforce, monitor and control quality of services (QoS) and service level agreements (SLAs).

"Web services management is a critical issue for us, and products like SOAPstation are exactly the type of solution that we need as we look to scale our deployment of Web services," said Bob Offutt, senior vice president and chief architect of SABRE Systems.

"Leading companies such as SABRE recognize the power and value that Web services will bring to their organizations, and are investing time and resources to build the infrastructure required to support a service-oriented IT architecture," said Frank Bergandi, chief executive officer of Actional. "Actional is committed to partnering with these enterprises to create high-value, business-centric Web services solutions, and SOAPstation is a critical factor in our formula for success."

About Actional SOAPstation

Actional SOAPstation is a Web services management platform that simplifies the secure distribution of Web services to broad networks of Web services consumer applications, allowing enterprises to dramatically lower their management costs while opening up new business opportunities. Actional SOAPstation acts as a Web services proxy, brokering the interactions between the applications that provide Web services and the systems that build on them.

Flexible, Powerful and Secure Service Provisioning

Actional SOAPstation allows organizations to securely distribute Web services to the broadest possible set of applications, regardless of organizational boundaries or varying technical infrastructures. Organizations can quickly configure new service access points with varying security models, message transports, data formats and service variants in order to meet the varied needs of specific service consumers.

Version and Variant Management

Actional SOAPstation enables the flexible rollout of new service versions and variants. By providing an insulation layer between providers and consumers of services, Actional SOAPstation allows service capability to be seamlessly changed, improved and even replaced throughout the service's lifecycle without disrupting service usage or creating large administrative and management overhead.

Business Activity Monitoring

Actional SOAPstation provides flexible and configurable reporting, monitoring, auditing, and alerting, enabling business-level control and auditability. This allows organizations to ensure Quality of Service (QoS), monitor and enforce Service Level Agreements (SLAs), integrate with accounting and billing systems and understand business activity.

End-to-End Security

Actional SOAPstation manages the security of Web services and intermediates between security domains, standards and implementations. By integrating with existing security infrastructures such as directories, single-sign-on systems and firewalls, Actional SOAPstation allows companies to deploy Web services securely in their environments today, while providing a flexible framework as security standards evolve and are deployed in products and services.

Enterprise-Caliber Deployment

Actional SOAPstation is deployable in fault tolerant clusters, can be load balanced, and provides scalable and dependable service brokering and messaging across organizational boundaries, security domains and service providers. In addition, service loads can be distributed across multiple equivalent service providers.

Intuitive and Powerful User Interface

Actional SOAPstation's powerful yet simple graphical user interface turns complex technical tasks into simple point-and-click exercises. By simplifying the complex, Actional SOAPstation provides agility and scalability to Web service deployments.

Availability

Actional SOAPstation runs on Windows, Solaris and Linux. The product is currently in beta and will be generally available in the coming quarter.

Visit Actional for a SOAPstation demonstration at booth # 610 at the Web Services Edge West 2002 Conference this week. The conference will be held in the McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, California from October 2-3, 2002

About Actional

Actional Corporation is an emerging leader in Web services management solutions. Actional provides enterprise solutions that unlock existing software assets as Web services and securely manage Web services distribution. Actional is a privately held company headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices across the United States, Canada and Europe. More than 100 of the Global 2000 including Rockwell Collins, Sabre, Reliant Energy and Swisscom use Actional's products in their mission-critical infrastructure. Actional's strategic partners include Microsoft, SAP and Oracle. For more information see www.actional.com.