Actional enhances SOA management platform

Actional on Monday will unveil Version 6.0 of its Actional SOA and Web services management platform, featuring enhancements in "business process visibility," governance, and security.

Business process visibility in Version 6.0 enables users to view SOA as a set of processes, with the ability to apply policies to an entire process such as to a claims or order process. This feature also helps ensure compliance with regulatory measures such as Sarbanes-Oxley and provides a consistent view of business processes and underlying infrastructure.

Users also can view metrics around business processes such as how many are running and how many are failing. Business processes can be examined from both business and IT perspectives.

"We automatically discover the actual process flow," said Dan Foody, Actional CTO. "Most other products that try to solve a problem like this require you to manually define what your process is," he said. Actional 6.0 discovers all services involved in a process.

Automated run-time governance functions in Release 6.0 detect rogue services, which are services that never went through proper approval processes. "It's not intentional [for this to happen], but it happens all the time," Foody said.

Policies can then be applied to these services, including quarantining until the service is approved.

Trust zones in Version 6.0 provide process-aware security, ensuring that use of services is done in the proper context. For example, a user may have to go through a security enforcement point before using an internal call center application.

An Actional user at Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which is prototyping an earlier version of Actional, said he liked the stability and XML support in Version 6.0, having tested it.

"It addresses potential issues we encountered in the previous version," in terms of stability, said Israel del Rio, vice president of technology solutions at Starwood.

Starwood will use Actional to monitor service invocation, to load balance service access, and for redundancy.

Actional 6.0 also adds support for Web services specifications such as WS-Policy, WS-MetadataExchange, and WS-ReliableMessaging. The reliable messaging specification is intended to ensure that transactions are not lost. Actional agents are provided to support SAP NetWeaver, Cisco AON (Application-Oriented Networking), and Sonic Software Sonic ESB (enterprise service bus).

Pricing for Version 6.0, which will be available on March 6, starts at $50,000. Actional was acquired by Progress Software in January but remains a separate product unit within another Progress property, Sonic Software.