Progress Software views BPM with Actional SOA tool
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Progress Software is launching its Progress Actional 7.1 SOA management platform Monday, featuring visibility across business processes and into related services and IT infrastructure.Business processes and BPM systems are tied into the underlying service infrastructure, said Dan Foody, vice president of Actional products at Progress. With Version 7.1, dependencies are revealed between business processes, services, middleware, and databases. Actional can provide proactive management or insight into why a business process failed."Now, we can relate the steps in the business process all the way down to the databases at the very end of that chain," so if a database goes down, Actional users can know which steps in the business process might be affected, Foody said.Also, if a service needs to be changed, or versioned, users can understand the impact of that service alteration. Impacts on applications such as an order entry processing system can be gauged.Actional's accommodations for BPM are needed, said analyst Frank Kenney, research director at Gartner. "It's something I think is very necessary, and it marks a different movement in the traditional SOA governance technology [space]. It starts to incorporate the notion of integrating with BPM technologies," Kenney said.Actional is providing visibility into the lifecycle of processes, but it will need to explain its system to customers and prospects, he said."The story is incredibly sophisticated, given that many people embarking on SOA governance are still getting their arms around what is a registry and what is a repository," Kenney said.Progress with Actional 7.1 also has integration with the Lombardi Teamworks BPM system and plans to add integrations with BPM systems from companies such as Software AG and Fujitsu.Support for Kerberos security also is highlighted. "It makes it easier to tie Windows environments very securely into Unix environments that may be running other security systems like SAML," Foody said.Also, Actional 7.1 can inspect the payload of messages not based on XML, such as RMI- or Enterprise JavaBeans-based messages. "[This capability] allows you to gain deeper insight into the applications that haven't yet been converted to Web services or may never get converted to Web services," said Foody.Actional 7.1 is available now with prices starting at $20,000. Progress acquired Actional about two years ago.
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Web services management vendor Actional and Westbridge Technology, which sold security infrastructure for Web services, are merging to focus on what company officials call âSOA (service-oriented architecture) enablement.â
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(InfoWorld) - AmberPoint will add an Adobe Flex-based interface to its SOA management platform, with the goal of giving users a bird's eye view of their SOA networks The company on Monday is announcing the release of Version 6 of AmberPoint SOA Management System and AmberPoint SOA Validation System. As part of Management System, AmberPoint will feature SOA Explorer, which provides a graphical, interactive view of SOA networks. SOA leverages Adobe's Flex and Flash technologies as well as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).Â  With SOA Explorer, users can monitor operational status and drill down on areas of interest. Filtering of information gives users a more manageable amount of information to digest. Without this capability, "you can see so much information that it's overwhelming," said Ed Horst, AmberPoint vice president of marketing. Capabilities in the new product release reflect the growth in SOA that AmberPoint is experiencing, Horst said. "This release is kind of an outgrowth of the kind of apps we're seeing in our installed base," he said. "We now have some customers with well over 1,000 components," in their SOA, Horst said. Some customers are processing millions of transactions per day, he added. "With that comes effectively a pretty complex environment to govern at run time. That's our business," Horst said. AmberPoint focuses on visibility into an SOA as well as control and validation, Horst said. He described validation as keeping things in order after changes are made. Also featured in the new AmberPoint platform is automatic throttling, to set limits on service usage, Horst said. The computer machine interface in AmberPoint, meanwhile, now supports scripting for capabilities such as performing automatic backups. Scripting technologies such as Ant and Perl are supported. An analyst weighed AmberPoint against rival Actional. AmberPoint has an edge over Actional in the area of visual effects, although Actional covers more messaging protocols, said analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president of Burton Group. "The thing that I think AmberPoint does really [well] is the visualization particularly from the business perspective and I think that's the edge that AmberPoint has over Actional at this point," Manes said. SOA Validation System, meanwhile, now validates business applications using transactions that span multiple services. Potential runtime anomalies are detected. Pricing for either SOA Management System or SOA Validation System starts at $25,000. AmberPoint 6 ships in 60 days.
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Part 2 in our series on business process execution In the last column in this series, we looked at the general concept of business process management with respect to SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) based systems. In particular, we reviewed BPEL (the Business Process Execution Language) and what it offers and at some of the extensions for BPEL.â¦
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BEA Systems on Thursday is unveiling a free Web-based tool to measure a customerâs âbaselineâ for pursuing an SOA (service-oriented architecture), and also is bolstering professional service offerings.ADVERTISEMENTWhite paper: Solutions to Address IT Control RequirementsLearn how BMC Software Solutions address requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 in this 20 page whitepaper!
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InfoWorld - In recent months, the&#160;acquisition of SOA player webMethods&#160;has been the dominant news coming out of Software AG, but the middleware company also continues to hone its mainframe software and strategy.
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New product from Pegasystems lets customers apply predictive models to business processes without complex coding.
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Daily progress reports for agile development teams.
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InfoWorld - With a new release of its business process management software available Wednesday, Tibco Software said it is enabling a tighter link with SOA and delivering a more integrated user experience.
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BEA has entered the event-driven architecture market with a product geared for SOA in Java environments.
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Borland Software Monday previewed updates to its Borland StarTeam and CaliberRM tools as part of a new vision for more closely tying the application development lifecycle to business processes.
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This paper from Parasoft discusses implementing the Parasoft Automated Error Prevention (AEP) Methodology into your development process with the objective of establishing fundamental development practices for a reliable Web service.
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I got an interesting teaser in the e-mail this week: âStudy Suggests Nearly Half of All Leaders See a Disconnect Between Strategy and Execution.â I wonât say who sent it because they blew the execution: The so-called study wasnât posted anywhere online, and when I called the number, theyâd already left for the weekend.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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(Source: Symantec) This white paper demonstrates how the Symantec APM solution helps organizations keep SOA applications running at peak performance to improve interactions and enhance business agility, flexibility and productivity.
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(InfoWorld) - Borland Software surveyed its own customers to get a snapshot of the ALM (application lifecycle management) market and found heterogeneity rules in application development.Â  The company polled more than 300 customers in May and June. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they support two or more development platforms, and 42 percent deploy to both Java and .Net. Half are using four or more ALM tools, and 33 percent have tools from more than three different vendors. Sixty-six percent of respondents use both open-source and commercial ALM tools. Meanwhile, 44 percent of respondents said they use two or more software development processes with agile methodologies and custom processes receiving the highest percentage of votes. "One of the reasons we're seeing folks actively move to the agile space is so they can be more responsive," said Marc Brown, Borland vice president of product marketing. But some user sites may not use agile processes if they have so many people trained on a particular process and gauge that change presents more risks than benefits, Brown said. According to the survey, the top priority in delivering software was meeting the needs of the business or customer with 59 percent selecting that priority. Some 25 percent ranked delivery of high-quality software as their top goal. Nearly 50 percent of respondents plan to implement process improvement initiatives as their biggest ALM projects for the coming year, Borland said. Integration of tools received 21 percent of the vote. The survey also found that organizations are challenged in effectively managing the end-to-end process of software delivery to achieve the full potential of ALM. Among the issues cited were disconnected processes, lack of visibility and traceability across the lifecycle, poor interoperability between tools, and lack of metrics and functional silos. Borland has re-focused the company from development tools to the ALM space with its Open ALM strategy that aims to accommodate existing software development assets in delivering software.
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The JyAALib project is a Java/Jython implementation of the Asynchronous Action Framework based in Pure Object Oriented Concepts. The Massive Parallel Framework in Python Language - Full Compatible with Jython-JAVA.   New Beta version 1.9 is available for the PyAALib-JyAALib : The Massive Parallel Framework in Python Language - Full Compatible with Jython-JAVA
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More process IBM has announced its Rational Software Delivery Platform 7.0 for desktops, to help developers design and deliver service oriented architectures (SOAs).â¦