Progress® Actional® EnterpriseManaging interconnected applications from development through application support to achieve business transaction assurance and optimize business outcomes

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IntErconnEctEd APPlIcAtIons: UnIqUE MAnAgEMEnt chAllEngEs

Companies invest in interconnected, distributed applications for their mission-critical processes to

get benefits like easy integration, business agility, lower IT costs, and, of course, more revenue. Then

during runtime issues occur: sporadic process interruptions, lost messages, business exceptions, or

order fallout. Customers, partners, and channels are negatively impacted. Revenue suffers.

Unfortunately, distributed, interconnected applications are inherently complex to manage successfully

across their lifecycle. During runtime, these often-service-based applications execute across

heterogeneous systems, may be owned by different organizations, and reside in different locations,

making visibility difficult. Increasing volumes of traffic compound this complexity, leading to an

increase in issues and, therefore, in IT time and costs to resolve them. Traditional management tools

are used after users report problems and business takes a hit. Other tools designed for managing

service-based applications require significant IT resources for time-consuming re-coding and massive

re-configuring and additional expensive server power to work.

Developing high-quality services is also challenging. There is a heavy reliance on XML as well as

difficulties in debugging and testing distributed software and a heightened need for cross-team

collaboration as services are combined and reused to create larger business-critical applications.

With all of these obstacles, how can you manage current applications that are core to critical

business operations and revenues immediately, to assure transaction success and gain benefits, and

build quality services consistently, to avoid issues? Just as important, how can you do all of this

efficiently and cost-effectively?

MAnAgIng IntErconnEctEd APPlIcAtIons cost-EffEctIvEly: A lIfEcyclE APProAch

With Progress® Actional® Enterprise, you can assure business transaction success from development

through application support and optimize operations to serve business goals. You can get up and

running quickly and cost-effectively with your existing applications and have the high performance

and scalability you need for future operations without proliferating expensive hardware. Because of

Actional’s comprehensive, powerful tools and a unique architecture, fewer IT resources work more

productively across the lifecycle—resulting in fewer problems, faster resolution when they occur, and

a low total cost of ownership.

With Progress® Actional® Enterprise,

you can assure business transaction

success from development through

application support and optimize

operations to serve business goals.

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drIvE qUAlIty In dEsIgn tIME

Actional Enterprise offers comprehensive validation and quality tools for SOA and service-based

applications. These include a pre-production collaborative platform that makes it easier for all project

team members to deliver well-tested, scalable, and policy-compliant services and applications.

Robust features allow architects, developers, testers, and business analysts to work together to drive

quality—from development to application support, and beyond.

collaborate across the Entire Project team

As services are being designed, developed, and tested, project teams can collaborate and share

quality-related assets, test results, and compliance policy rules to eliminate problems earlier in

the lifecycle when they are easier to find and less costly to fix. Actional’s integrated collaboration,

testing, and compliance tools allow individuals to:

share test suites, load tests, and assets across one or more >

teams—so they can leverage each other’s work from development through

application support. Users can create and share Workspaces that contain

Web services, contracts, messages, recorded actions, simulated operations,

and shared tests. There are also project partitions called “service spaces”

that enable teams to organize, collaborate, and share project assets while

limiting access to other organizations sharing the same server. Shared assets

containing context-rich data, test simulations, compliance rules, artifacts,

and more can be used for unit, functional, load, regression, and acceptance

testing, without the need for versioning.

Understand service behavior, without writing code or knowing >

XMl—by “invoking” services and viewing the response in real time, in

an easy-to-understand XML message format called “Pseudocode™.” Clicking “resend” sends the

message to the server multiple times while making small changes. This makes testing extremely

fast and efficient for everyone—without writing a single line of code or requiring deep knowledge

of XML. WSDL contracts and REST-style contracts described in Web Application Description

Language (WADL) can also be imported, viewed, compared, and graphed.

vAlIdAtE sErvIcE BEhAvIor, PErforMAncE, scAlABIlIty

With Actional Enterprise, teams have powerful visualization, diagnostic, and testing capabilities that

pinpoint critical problem areas requiring early attention as well as automated policy enforcement tools

to help prevent runtime issues:

With Actional Enterprise, teams have

powerful visualization, diagnostic,

and testing capabilities that pinpoint

critical problem areas requiring early

attention as well as automated policy

enforcement tools to help prevent

runtime issues.

Service Space

Service Space

Service Space

Diagnostics

Support

Testing

Workspaces

Load Check

Test Suites

Policy Check

Governance

Integration to

Actional®

ApplicationDevelopment

andActional®

Enterprise

Service Spaces dramatically improve team collaboration and productivity by allowing everyone on the service team to access test suites, load

tests, assets and artifacts in one shared place.

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End-to-end visualization is provided without coding. Actional’s patented flow Mapping®

technology automatically discovers and traces transaction flow across the production environment as

well as simulated environments in development. Flow maps enable developers to optimize services for

production by showing how application components are put together and how they will work. Actional

also provides statistics on the availability and performance of each service and shows who is using

what service. During migration, team members can make sure that only the appropriate people are

accessing services in the proper environment.

diagnosis and testing, early and often, ensure that services are free of architectural issues

typically coded in pre-production that can cause transaction failures or downtime and be difficult to

find and fix in a heterogeneous, distributed runtime environment. To mitigate these risks, developers,

testers, and QA professionals can use the following features to optimize runtime reliability,

integration, performance, and scalability:

Easy-to-use, powerful unit, functional, and regression testing > —help developers and testers to

identify and resolve performance problems as services are being created and tested.

service simulation and scenario testing > —give developers and their managers a deeper,

more detailed understanding of Web service behavior, with little or no coding. Users can simulate

services and replay lists of actions to verify that responses match existing benchmarks. Users can

also create scenario tests based on captured or invoked messages or by supplying parameters to

powerful templates created directly from a WSDL.

load testing > —allows members of project teams without specialized performance and load testing

skills to create load tests for up to 100 virtual clients, with no coding required.

Policy compliance enforcement assures that services perform well in production and will

interoperate as services are reused and applications change. Actional Enterprise promotes a “contract

first” approach and offers features that ensure services adhere to industry and corporate standards

and perform well in production:

Policy authoring and checking > —allows pre-production teams to create and enforce SOA design

standards by combining industry policy sets (e.g., WS-I Basic Profile, WS-Security) with customized

organizational best practices.

contract annotations > —give individuals the ability to add comments to particular parts of a

contract definition to clarify its usage. This turns a WSDL contract into a center point for learning

about a Web service.

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MAnAgIng EXIstIng APPlIcAtIons: dEtEct IssUEs ProActIvEly

With Actional Enterprise at runtime you can spot delays, missed steps, operational anomalies, and

lost transactions and pinpoint looming issues early—to avoid full-blown incidents and minimize

downtime. Key capabilities include:

End-to-end visibility with automatic discovery and tracking: no coding. no performance

impact. It just works. Actional’s patented Flow Mapping® technology automatically discovers

and maps all services and their interdependencies across an end-to-end transaction in today’s

heterogeneous, distributed production environments while adding just microseconds of latency. It also

updates itself when services change—without coding or modeling.

tracking flow through unmanaged nodes > —Actional relates the data fields of the inbound

messages to outbound messages in the managed nodes. As a result, you have visibility into every

process step including those on systems in the transaction path lacking an agent.

real-time and historical process data > —Actional makes this available in real-time dashboards

and historical reports. You always know what’s happening, or not happening, in the runtime

environment and can compare it to past performance—without manual data gathering, correlation,

and reporting.

Unmatched integration and interoperability > —for enterprise-wide monitoring and man-

agement--Actional easily integrates and interoperates with a wide range of heterogeneous

computing resources--applications, data sources, network devices, middleware, and registries/

repositories—and mediates multiple message protocols. (See “Technical Specifications” on

page 10).

Figure 1: Actional Network Flow Map

With Actional Enterprise at runtime

you can spot delays, missed steps,

operational anomalies, and lost

transactions and pinpoint looming

issues early—to avoid full-blown

incidents and minimize downtime.

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Figure 2: Alert with detailed flow map of an individual transaction

dIAgnosE And rEPAIr ProBlEMs qUIckly

When problems occur, Actional Enterprise enables fast root-cause analysis to prevent business

interruptions and service-level agreement (SLA) violations. As a result, you can maximize uptime,

minimize support-time and costs, and keep customers, partners, and channels satisfied:

Policy authoring and policy-based alerting > —allow you to take action before a crisis occurs.

With an easy-to-use, centralized interface, experts can quickly and efficiently create business,

security, and compliance policies, including service alert thresholds and actions for active IT

management of SLAs. Unique to Actional, policies can be authored to meet specific business needs–

from simply monitoring average metrics or setting policy for a single transaction, to creating a single

policy that combines multiple metrics and multiple classes of service. When a policy is violated,

Actional automatically gathers information to present a complete view of the nodes involved in the

policy violation as well as statistics related to the violation. An alert is also sent so you can respond

before end users report the problem or it negatively affects business. Policies can be applied to

managed or unmanaged nodes in the transaction flow; to an entire process; or to abstract types of

information, such as “personal identity.”

custom log management > —gives you greater insight into the application layer by integrating the

Actional audit log with runtime-generated application errors and events. This coupling of runtime

audit data with key application-level logging (embedded during design time) allows you to diagnose

application-specific problems more quickly and easily without the IT time and cost of grepping

log files.

Maximize uptime, minimize

support-time and costs, and

keep customers, partners, and

channels satisfied.

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Integration with the development server > —enables the support team to collaborate with the

pre-production team for faster, accurate problem resolution. When an alert is triggered, the support

team can perform root-cause analysis to find the “offending” system, and the Actional audit log

captures the message and all contextual information. The audit log of the runtime request can then

be transferred into a Workspace on the Actional Development Server, where business analysts and

developers can collaborate on the problem. They can compare the content of the failed message to

the content of a prior successful message, to detect differences. Then they can create a test case

and add it to a Test Suite for regression testing. Once the team has determined the cause of the

problem, the message can then be fixed, updated, invoked, and resent back through the application

to get the order properly processed. (See Figure 4, page 9.)

PrEvEnt BUsInEss loss, oPtIMIzE BUsInEss oUtcoMEs

Actional Enterprise provides a business perspective on executing transactions as well as tools to

dynamically manage service behavior to optimize business outcomes—for example, to provide the

best service to high-priority customers, partners, and channels.

Business insight for decision support > —Flow Mapping relates end-to-end business process

execution to the underlying IT activity without manual modeling. It captures service levels, process

metrics like order-to-fulfillment times, and key business indicators as transactions flow across

network systems—even on unmanaged network nodes. You can simultaneously view and analyze

this information by individual customer, customer class or group, region, division, or any other custom

dimension. These multi-dimensional analytics are available in both real-time operational views and

user-configurable, browser-based dashboards in graphical formats for decision support.

Figure 3: Actional dashboard with business analytics

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Automatic and manual controls for managing operations to support business goals > —You

can modify application behavior to accommodate temporary issues like congestion or service outages

or control long-term service delivery, for example, giving priority processing to high-value transactions

and important customers. During service upgrades and versioning, you can also move consumers

of a service to the new version over time. These actions are achieved through policies, alerting,

content-based routing, load balancing, and failover.

Policy-based controls for security and compliance > —Actional can mediate security across

heterogeneous platforms and Web services standards and includes support for WS-Security. (See

Technical Specifications below.) It also avoids potential security breaches and prevents unintended

usage of services through the enforcement of trust zones. Trust zone policy prevents message traffic

from reaching service endpoints if it hasn’t passed through designated security check point.

In addition, while alternative approaches can only apply policies to services and operations, Actional

applies policies to end-to-end processes wherever they flow, allowing processes and services

to change without requiring policy changes or re-applications. Actional also applies policy to

abstract information types, such as “personal identity” or “credit card details,” providing consistent

control over sensitive information, or can act based on the context of a message, such as shipping

information, to prevent sending goods to restricted destinations—for compliance enforcement.

service governance through integration and rogue service control > —The optional Actional

Governance Integration Module integrates with leading registries/repositories, feeding them

metrics on the actual performance of services and on service dependencies. This information helps

IT operations and developers to understand the impact of service versioning and maintenance,

reducing runtime disruption. The integration also enables Actional to automatically discover rogue

(i.e., unauthorized) services and governs their activities according to applicable policies. This

action ensures that security and regulatory compliance are not compromised and prevents capacity

overloads from unplanned services.

Actional applies policies to

end-to-end processes wherever they

flow, allowing processes and services

to change without requiring policy

changes or re-applications.

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fEWEr It rEsoUrcEs, lEss hArdWArE, loW totAl cost of oWnErshIP

Actional Enterprise provides all of these powerful features with a low TCO, based on a unique

architecture that provides:

non-invasive monitoring and management with no coding and minimal configuration > —

Actional ties into existing applications on the network to leverage their message processing. In

this way it automatically discovers and tracks nodes with no coding (therefore, requiring fewer IT

resources), no duplicate processing, and only microseconds of latency. That means you can begin to

manage your existing applications as well as introduce and evolve applications quickly and easily.

Because Actional requires less than two percent of CPU capacity per network node, you get high

performance and cost-effective scaling on the network

Figure 4: Actional architecture diagram—plus integration of Actional Management and Development Servers

DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONSDISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS

ApplicationOwners

Application Development

SOA OwnersSecurity and

Compliance Staff

Actional Point of Visibility Actional Point of Control Actional Point of Enforcement

Actional Agent Legend

PRODUCTION

TransactionFails

TransactionSucceeds

2. MessageCapture

1. PolicyViolation

3. Root-CauseAnalysis

5. Repair& Resend

6. Test CaseCreated

Monitor

4. Message Analysis

PRE-PRODUCTION

Development

Validation

2. Compliance

1. Prototyping

3. FunctionalTesting

5. Deployment

6. Support

Change

4. Load Testing

STAKEHOLDERS

Actional ServersActional Servers

Policies are deployed to appropriate agents where they are enforced locally, removing the management server as a bottleneck or single-point-of-failure.

Faster exception management where failed messages are compared to successful ones, differences detected, fixed and resent to production. Test Case created for regression testing.

Stakeholders centrally create and manage policies.

ServicesFrom External

Sources

ServicesTo ExternalSources

MANAGEMENT LAYER

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Also, the Actional Management Server is never a single point of failure or a bottleneck. Message

content is never sent across the network, and policy execution is fully distributed to enforcement

points on the network. As a result, the server can support more than 1,000 managed systems, and

companies can build and scale enterprise-class, distributed, service-based applications without

proliferating costly servers.

Efficient, cost-effective policy management > —Only Actional fully decouples the policy

lifecycle from the service development lifecycle, enabling centralized management and distributed

enforcement of security, compliance, and business policies (such as SLAs). This separation allows

policies and services (or processes where they apply) to version independently, without any lapse in

policy enforcement or disruption of transactions—and without time-consuming, costly re-coding or

re-application.

This approach also puts policy in the hands of domain-specific experts and empowers them to

define policy once and apply it appropriately throughout the network --assuring that no service

falls between the cracks, for reduced risk. It also relieves service developers of coding policy

into services (and re-coding when policies or services change), reducing IT time and costs and

decreasing the time-to-market for new and changed applications.

BroAd sUPPort: tEchnIcAl sPEcs

Actional integrates and interoperates with a wide range of IT resources and mediates multiple

message protocols and security credential types.

Actional Management Server is certified to run on the following platforms:

oPErAtIng systEMs: BroWsErs: APPlIcAtIon

sErvErs: dAtABAsEs: JAvA vIrtUAl MAchInE:

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Internet Explorer,

BEA WebLogic Server,

SQL Server, Sun JDK,

Red Hat Linux Mozilla Firefox IBM WebSphere, Oracle, BEA Jrockit JVM

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

JBoss Server, DB2,

SolarisOracle Application Server (OAS),

PostgreSQL,

HP-UX SAP NetWeaver MSDE

IBM AIX

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Actional Management Server provides visibility into applications on the following platforms and

software programs:

Protocols and interfaces supported include Axis, SOAP, REST, POX, EJB, JMS, Servlets (HTTP),

Jakarta, HTTP client, ADO.Net, RMI, and JDBC,

Actional Enterprise also integrates with a variety of standards-based, third-party identity management,

entitlement management, and SSO technologies including Kerberos, RSA ClearTrust, Oracle Access

Manager, CA SiteMinder, Tivoli Access Manager, HP SelectAccess, and Securent.

Oracle WebLogic Server (formerly BEA >

WebLogic Server)

IBM WebSphere >

JBoss Server >

Oracle Application Server (OAS) >

Systinet WASP/J >

Microsoft .NET framework >

SAP NetWeaver Application Server >

Progress > ® Sonic® ESB

Progress > ® SonicMQ®

Oracle Service Bus (formerly AquaLogic >

Service Bus)

WebMethods Integration Server X-broker >

Cisco Reactivity >

Lombardi TeamWorks business process >

management (BPM) software.

tAkE thE nEXt stEPFor more information, contact your local Progress sales representative or visit www.progress.com/actional.

ABoUt ProgrEss softWArE

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) provides application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Our goal is to maximize the benefits of information technology while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership.

0000122992

Prod Code 3991

Worldwide headquarters Progress Software Corporation, 14 Oak Park, Bedford, MA 01730 USA Tel: +1 781 280-4000 Fax: +1 781 280-4095 On the Web at: www.progress.com

for regional international office locations and contact information, please refer to the Web page below: http://www.progress.com/worldwide

© 2009 Progress Software Corporation and/or its subsidiaries or affiliates. All rights reserved. Progress, Actional, Sonic, and SonicMQ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sonic Software Corporation or one of its affiliates or subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Specifications subject to change without notice.