Actional Unveils the Next Phase of Its SOA Management Offerings.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 14, 2004

Actional 5.1 Offers True End-to-End Visibility and Control of an

Organization's Entire Service Network,

Now Including Non-SOAP Services

Actional Corporation, the Web services management market-share leader, today announced significant enhancements across its entire SOA management platform. The new release, Actional 5.1, extends management capabilities beyond Web services (SOAP and XML) to encompass other types of services that are typically part of an overall service-oriented architecture (SOA). Building on its unique, patent-pending technology, Actional continues to expand its capabilities, and is now the only vendor to provide true end-to-end SOA visibility and control, delivering to organizations the tools necessary to monitor and address SOA management challenges regardless of service type, stakeholder, or phase of the SOA project lifecycle.

"As Web services evolve from novelties to important components of corporate IT, companies are requesting features that reflect real world needs for production systems. Actional 5.1, with its new management agents and improved analysis capabilities, is about meeting these needs," said Tom Rhinelander, analyst with New Rowley Group. "In addition, Actional's focus on SOA management reflects the fact that companies should focus on the entire interconnected service environment, not just collections of Web services."

Expanded SOA Management from a Single Console

Actional is expanding the scope of Looking Glass, launching the first in a series of new Active Agents for managing non-SOAP services, specifically databases, Web pages, middleware and non-XML legacy systems. The new 5.1 products include Actional Active Agent for JDBC, Actional Active Agent for JSP and Servlets, and Actional Active Agent for ASPX. Further, Actional is offering an SDK to enable the management of legacy and custom non-SOAP services within an SOA environment.

Additionally, Looking Glass 5.1 has been enhanced to support the new Active Agents, which fully leverage existing Looking Glass features such as SLA monitoring and enforcement, automatic correlation across all service tiers, root cause analysis and watchdogs for proactive monitoring. With the Looking Glass 5.1 enhancements, combined with its ability to integrate with traditional systems management solutions, organizations can use Looking Glass to actively control the entire SOA from within a single console.

SOA Visibility and Control for Every Stakeholder

With the release of 5.1, Actional builds on its ability to address the needs of various stakeholders within the organization, from developers to administrators to business users. Looking Glass 5.1 introduces sophisticated business impact analysis, forming a clear tie between operations and business needs. A bridge between pure business monitoring and pure infrastructure monitoring, Looking Glass 5.1 allows service requests to be partitioned into multiple user-defined dimensions to track service activity and apply service-level policies based on real business factors. Examples of dimensions include standard customer classification information, geographical location, business structure and order value, and others, all of which can be defined through a simple user interface, using any context or content information from the service requests.

Further, with the recent introduction of Actional's new SOAPstation Developer Version, developers can accelerate the delivery of their projects while simultaneously making them immediately manageable, reducing the cost and complexity of SOA services. Additionally, administrators have access to Looking Glass capabilities for monitoring and assessment, while business users have increased visibility into the service network and support for business impact analysis with Actional's MyServices Portal.

The core Actional platform mediates among these users, providing role based administration capabilities so each class of user can view or change only the information and configuration for which they are authorized. A new feature for the 5.1 platform, self-service administration allows shared installations of Actional products to appear as if each user has their own copy of the software, dedicated only to their use. With "virtual Web services management" software for every team, organizations can cut down on the cost and complexity of managing separate installations.

Tools for the Entire SOA Lifecycle 

To ensure a project's success in an overall SOA environment, management cannot be an afterthought. Actional's SOA management platform offers management across the entire SOA lifecycle. From development to production, services are visible and controlled. Specifically, the 5.1 platform offers enhancements to increase deployment speed and efficiency through automated machine build-out and provisioning to tailor services for unexpected uses. After SOA rollout, Looking Glass 5.1 includes service stabilizers and proven capabilities for SLA enforcement, dependency tracking and root cause analysis.

"In reality, no organization builds an SOA from scratch, using only SOAP and XML. While SOAP and XML may form the 'bus' at the core of an SOA, an SOA evolves from and extends the existing enterprise architecture which encompasses many other types of services," said Dan Foody, CTO of Actional. "With 5.1, Actional helps align IT more closely with business needs, addressing the entire network and ensuring customers' investments in SOAs have a strong impact on the business."

Availability

Actional 5.1 is now available.

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.