Actional Resources
Progress® Actional® is the leader in delivering management products and solutions for today's interconnected applications - including service-oriented architecture (SOA). Learn more about SOA and Web service management technologies by reading through our broad selection of white papers, on-demand webinars, podcasts and other helpful learning resources.
Building Responsive Enterprises: One Decision at a Time
Get a closer look at decision management and find out how it weaves business process management (BPM), event correlation, and business activity monitoring (BAM) together. Read the paper written by James Taylor and learn more about the role of automating decisions within your business operations.
Don't Let Your SLAs Get Lost in the Cloud
Service-level agreements (SLAs) are crucial any time a business service provider (BSP) provides an application or service to a client via the cloud. In this survey, 76% of respondents report that SLAs are critical to winning new business. Yet, 84% are unable always to meet their SLAs.
Achieving Operational Responsiveness Through Responsive Process Management (RPM)
Without having actionable insight or the ability to sense and respond immediately to the events that affect your business day in and day out, you’re flying blind. Learn how the Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite can help you become operationally responsive so you can respond to changing conditions and business events in real-time.
Actional Architecture: Core Operational Management
The Actional architecture enables end-to-end transaction monitoring and alerting as well as fast root cause analysis—with cost-effective scalability and high performance. This paper presents a detailed description of the unique technology that makes these and other key characteristics possible.
Agile Load Checking for SOA Quality
Uncover SOA performance problems early in development. This white paper clears up misconceptions about early load testing, and offers practical advice on how to incorporate early load testing on your SOA projects.
Application Portfolio Assessment Guide: Are Your Business-critical Applications at Risk?
This Assessment Guide helps you to create a high-level overview for each business-critical application, detailing the context of the application, highlighting risk factors and overall effectiveness of each application. This assessment, in turn, will provide a foundation for further investigation and actions to optimize the outcomes of your business-critical transactions and mitigate risk.
Business Process Visibility: Aligning IT and Business Goals
As distributed, interconnected applications of all kinds grow in popularity, there is a need for line-of-business owners to collaborate more effectively with IT departments to align their implementations with business goals. The problem is the lack of visibility into, and data on, what exactly is going on in the real-time services network from a business point of view. This white paper discusses this problem and the unique solution from Actional that enables organizations to realize the full business potential of distributed, interconnected applications that are essential to critical business operations and lines of revenues.
Faster than a speeding bullet. Is your business ready?
"Faster than a speeding bullet" doesn't just refer to superheroes anymore; it's the velocity your business needs to compete. For example, the standard for trade-to-settlement time in financial services has gone from T+3 (trade date plus three days) to T+0 in just a few years. Event-driven SOA infrastructure—from ESBs to real-time data services and complex event processing (CEP)—can streamline provisioning and visibility in your business. This paper will explain how you can stay ahead of today's increasing business velocity.
IT Impact on Reservation Management
Did you know that travel industry loses $11.5 million per year through failed transactions? For travel and leisure companies, reservation transaction failures are occurring at twice the rate of the increase in their volume. Transaction failures could be hurting your company, too. To learn what the problem is and how it may impact your business, read a report by Vanson Bourne, an independent research firm.
RPM in Financial Services
Gain real-time visibility into your payments operations so that you can identify payment exceptions or abnormal loan approval queue length/times. Get insight as to how you can get a real-time view into your clearing and settlement operations to detect prospective trade failures before they cost you client satisfaction and profits. Read this paper and learn about other ways RPM can help those in financial services achieve operational responsiveness.
IT Impact on Telecommunications Order Fallout
Did you know that 61 telcos worldwide reported a loss of up to 10% of revenue due to order fallout? Why is this happening? How else is order fallout affecting companies? This report by Vanson Bourne, an independent research firm, examines the scope and nature of the problem. Business transaction assurance—making sure orders process successfully—may seem simple but it isn't. Learn about the challenges that telecommunications experts face and why current monitoring and management systems can’t do the job.
Implementing a Successful Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Pilot Program: A SOA Introduction
This SOA introduction provides a detailed understanding of the essentials surrounding the planning your first SOA – mapping out both IT and business considerations as well as measurement and success criteria. By consolidating and reusing common services, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) offer many benefits to today's organizations. This whitepaper will guide those pursuing SOA towards proven best practices to increase the likelihood of success.
Managing Business-Critical Applications: A Guide to Finding the Right Software
The right software for managing critical applications can actually optimize your business results. Consider this... your critical applications are those that are vital to increasing revenue or productivity. In other words, they execute your key business transactions and are key business assets that support revenue generation, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Read this buyers' guide and learn how to choose the right management software for your critical applications.
Operational Excellence for Distributed, Interconnected Applications
Modern distributed, interconnected applications provide a new level of agility to businesses and IT. In these applications, the software for a business process is composed of "services," components consisting of discrete business functionality that can be recombined and reused in different business processes, enabling rapid business change. This white paper examines the challenges of, and solutions for, effectively managing their operations.
SOA Worst Practices Volume II: A Look At Governance
SOA Worst Practices, Volume II, as the title suggests, is the follow-on white paper to SOA Worst Practices, Volume I: a collection, of dubious—and sometimes disastrous—case studies of service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations. Each scenario describes and analyzes the critical SOA errors and lessons learned, and then a prescription is revealed to stimulate discussion and corrective possibilities.
SOA Worst Practices, Volume I
Make no mistake: SOA can be tricky. Learn from this compilation of "SOA Worst Practices" which traps to avoid. Learn the limits of XML firewalls. Find out how not to fall prey to consultants. Make sure you don't hand out your WSDL to passersby... This wisdom and much, much more from the experts at Actional.
Team Collaboration in Development
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The Foundation for SOA Quality
What does SOA quality really mean? This white paper not only answers that question but it also examines the many facets of SOA quality. Learn how you can ensure that your service-based initiative, such as Web 2.0, cloud computing, and BPM, can deliver the visibility and operational responsiveness that your enterprise demands.
Why Runtime Governance Is Critical for Service-based Applications
With the increasing deployment of SOA infrastructure and other distributed, interconnected, service-based applications in organizations, IT professionals are discovering the importance of being able to take control of the runtime environment. Many service-based implementations are just not working in production as designed or expected. This white paper explains why runtime governance is essential for modern, distributed, interconnected applications and what problems it solves.
Maximize Your OpenEdge Application Investment with Actional
Are you ready to achieve new levels of visibility and management control? If so, then view this archived webinar and see how the latest release of OpenEdge is integrated with Actional. Bring these two technologies together will give you unprecedented visibility and transaction management capabilities that go above and beyond your existing OpenEdge applications.
Reduce Order Fallout and Keep Profit in your Pocket
Has multi-play service delivery increased your IT complexity and accelerated order fallout? Multi-play service delivery, evolving products and services, and ongoing customer churn have increased order fallout exponentially for many service providers. Industry analysts have stated that more than 25% of consumer orders are lost, stalled, or inaccurate. For enterprise customers, rates can be even higher. This not only results in lost revenue and increased operational costs, it diminishes the customer experience and pushes customers to your competition.
Paving the Way to Smart Grid Modernization
Replay a webinar hosted by Progress Software and UISOL. During the webinar, we unveil our unique, standards-based reference architecture that uses a product integration bus to simplify technology deployment and upgrades. With our combined technology, integration and domain expertise, we also provide insights on:
- Market and regulatory conditions
- The readiness of legacy applications to support real-time smart metering data
- The cost and difficulties of integrating disparate utilities systems
- Steps for moving to a smart grid-compatible environment, cost-effectively and non-intrusively
Your Business Moves Faster When You're at the Controls
Moderated by IDC Program Director, Maureen Fleming, and Progress CTO, Dr. John Bates, this webinar explores factors driving the emergence of business navigation systems and how they improve operational responsiveness. Replay this webinar and hear how you can capitalize on opportunities, drive higher efficiency, and reduce risk with business navigation systems.
You’ve Got an ESB. Now… Don’t Get Lost in Transactions
Sure, your ESB has done a great job of integrating your SOA environment, but an ESB can introduce new management complexities. Watch and learn how you can gain complete end-to-end visibility of your heterogeneous environment, and pinpoint the root cause of any problems that arise.
Understanding the TEI of Progress Actional
Interested in how a company achieved a 208% ROI with a payback period of less than 12 months?
Replay this webinar to hear featured guest Randy Heffner, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, detail the total economic impact (TEI) of Actional using in-depth interviews with Actional customers.
1+1=3: Marrying Best-of-breed Tools for Business Process Governance
Communication is the basis of any successful relationship, including that between business people and technologists. Bringing together BPM and SOA Governance enables business drivers to be translated quickly to SOA implementation, with full accountability, lower cost of ownership, and business-level SOA optimization.
SOA Worst Practices: How to Secure the Health of Your SOA from the Start
Listen to Progress Software and MomentumSI presenters as they provide some helpful guidelines for SOA success. Don't fall victim to common SOA mistakes: learn from the dubious design, development and deployment practices of some not-so-fortunate IT organizations.
Faster Than A Speeding Bullet
Are you ready for event-driven business? Your systems can't keep up with the ever-increasing velocity of business. Financial trade settlement has accelerated from three days to two hours in just a few years; the trend towards real-time business is repeating itself in almost every industry.
SOA and Web Service Management
Why planning now is vital for success. As organizations frame their strategies, a key measure of success is how well critical applications, from online sales to call center applications, are being served. To ensure success, complete visibility and tracking service interactions to meet SLA's are required. Monitoring transactions in real-time provides visibility into who is experiencing problems, the type and magnitude of problems, and the business transaction impacted. Setting up these fundamental management principles enables the organization to take action before the business is affected, before the SLA is violated and before you've lost control!
SOA Governance
What is SOA governance? Find out how it relates to policy-setting and compliance in your Web services environment – and how it is essential to the functioning of your network from development through deployment and test – and especially during runtime.
Implementing a Successful SOA Pilot Program
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is not easy to do right: IT teams must overcome technical, organizational, political and other hurdles on the path to SOA nirvana. In this on-demand webinar, Progress Actional and key partners share their real-world experience to help you avoid the most common pains associated with implementing SOA for the first time.
Operating Your SOA
Are You Up to the Challenge? Listen as Progress Software and David Schwartz from University of Phoenix discuss fundamental SOA management principles that help enterprises recognize the full potential of an SOA with end-to-end visibility that quickly translates into more efficient and cost-effective SOA operations. Highlights include service governance through automatic discovery of services and dependencies, increased IT efficiency through root cause analysis and enterprise scalability and high performance without increased costs.
SOA Security and Compliance: How to Avoid the Risks
If your business has substantial security or regulatory compliance requirements, chances are you have concerns about enforcing appropriate measures, while keeping overhead and costs to a minimum. Ensuring security and compliance won’t bring in additional revenue, but failure to enforce such measures can result in substantial risk and cost. Join Progress Actional and Partners HealthCare for this webinar and learn how a decoupled approach to service development and centralized security management can help you manage the risk across your enterprise SOA.
The Risks, Strategies and PayOff: SOA Runtime Governance
Cut through all of the confusion around SOA governance to learn the ins-and-outs of the two key aspects of SOA runtime governance: visibility and policy enforcement. Hear the challenges and strategies for addressing them. By learning how SOA runtime governance can directly impact your business, you will have the key information needed to build a business case to justify the investment in SOA solutions.
Visibility and Tracking for Critical Applications
Optimize application performance and increase revenue. Whether you have one or 500 web services, learn why Web Service and SOA Management is becoming "required insurance" for any enterprise that has mission critical applications that rely on these services. Hear first hand how customers are using Web Service and SOA Management to stay two steps ahead of the competition.
Progress Announces Actional DiagnosticsPresented By Dan Foody Designed for application developers and testers, Actional Diagnostics will help you build, test and deliver higher quality web services. Listen and learn more. |
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Impact of Cloud Computing on Enterprise ArchitecturePresented By David Bressler What impact will Cloud Computing have on your enterprise architecture? Why should you care? In this podcast David Bressler presents his thoughts on how Cloud Computing will make it easier for you to get business-critical information to your consumers. Allow yourself to imagine the impact of being able to easily bring information from multiple data services, and sources, into the cloud. |
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Secure Your Services, Never Lose an OrderPresented By Dan Foody Listen to this podcast and hear Dan Foody, VP of Products at Progress Software, talk about the shift from processing simple web service transactions to business transaction assurance. He’ll talk about how today’s transaction complexity forces an enterprise to invest in management software that will improve business transaction processing so that you never lose sight of critical business events. |
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Cloud Computing - The New SOA?Presented By Dan Foody Is SOA dead? It seems the technology buzz these days is all about cloud computing. What's the difference? Do they complement one another? Listen to this podcast and hear Dan talk candidly about how cloud computing and Web 2.0 are being integrated into today's enterprise architecture. |
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The Number of Services Required Before You Consider SOA ManagementPresented By Dan Foody Is there a golden number of services that should be running before you even consider SOA management solutions? This podcast presents key thoughts and field observations about the importance of the quality of your services and not the quantity. Considering SOA management solutions during the planning phase of SOA infrastructure is crucial for success. |
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SOA Management: Do you really need it? What the cost is for not having itPresented By Dan Foody What the cost is for not having it? Did you forget to think about SOA management when you developed your SOA infrastructure deployment plan? Listen as Dan gives an example of a company that did just that and regretted it. Make your SOA more agile by making sure that the right SOA management tools are in place before you deploy. |
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SOA and Cloud ComputingPresented By Dan Foody A brief podcast that briefly describes what "we" mean by cloud computing and how cloud computing may affect your existing SOA infrastructure. |
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Implementing SOA During an Economic DownturnPresented By Dan Foody If your budget is tight, you may be thinking of slowing down or even stopping your SOA initiatives. Think again. Dan Foody suggests looking for the quick wins that will allow you to continually enhance your SOA infrastructure. In this podcast, he talks about business-critical issues such as security and compliance, and SOA governance that can't be ignored even during a weak economic environment. |
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Actional in Financial ServicesPresented By Dan Foody In this podcast, you will hear how Progress Actional products have been deployed within the Financial Services industry. |
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Actional in TelecommunicationsPresented By Dan Foody Get insight as to how Progress Actional products have been deployed within the Telecommunications industry. |
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Gain Better Enterprise Visibility of Your SOAPresented By Giles Nelson What if you could gain better visibility of your SOA infrastructure? Listen as Giles Nelson presents his observations on the challenges that many enterprises face when trying to identify business requirements and deploy smart solutions that will support these requirements. |
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SOA VisionariesPresented By Dave Linthicum , Julianna Cammarano This podcast channel provides SOA visionaries, such as Progress Software, with the ability to explain how they have provided value to the world of SOA, and how their technology is changing the landscape. |
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SOA: Time to Value for ITPresented By Hub Vandervoort Hub Vandervoort discusses the steps for bridging the gap between formulating new business plans for change and creating the information technology in an SOA to support them. |
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Actional Enterprise Data Sheet
Learn how Actional Enterprise manages interconnected applications from development through application support to achieve business transaction assurance and optimize business outcomes.
Actional Application Development
Fix quality and validation issues in your SOA and service based applications before production.
Actional Application Diagnostics
Accelerate Web service development, testing and validation with tools to improve service quality, performance, and compliance, and simplify time consuming XML-oriented tasks.
Business Transaction Assurance
Never lose a transaction! Read this data sheet ensure the success of every transaction with end-to-end visibility into your enterprise operations.
Actional for Sonic ESB Management
Enhance ESB management to ensure reliable operations across your entire service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Optimizing OpenEdge Applications with Actional Management
Get a closer look at how Actional monitors a wide variety of technologies and systems including OpenEdge and proactively manages end-to-end operations—to ensure transaction success and optimize business outcomes.
Progress Sonic SLA Support Solution
Reducing systems fallout by even 1% can save your company lots of money. Learn more!
Key Strategies for SOA TestingDoes testing change with SOA? You bet it does. Truth be told, testing SOAs is a complex, disconcerting computing problem. You need to learn how to isolate, check, and integrate, assuring that things work at the service, persistence, and process layers. This eBook presents the basics of SOA testing, best practices on building an SOA testing plan, and provides a step-by-step guide to SOA testing. |
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SOA: Socially Oriented ArchitectureTechnical Opportunities, Social Challenges. In this E-book, Hub will make you rethink the centralized, top-down approach to SOA governance and develop a consensual form of governance that supports a socially oriented architecture. This E-book presents ideas on how to create federated communities among diverse SOA participants for richer, more dynamic user experiences. |
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Free Return on Investment (ROI) Assurance E-kit
Measure the benefits of using Actional Enterprise with the ROI Assurance E-kit.
This E-kit includes insightful papers and an e-book that will help you ensure that your Web services never fail.
 
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What is Operational Responsiveness?Part I of a VII part series. Dr. John Bates talks about how your business can achieve operational responsiveness through responsive process management (RPM). |
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Insight into Responsive Process Management (Part 1)A video featuring Dr. John Bates, CTO & Head of Corporate Development, presents why business leaders need to achieve Operational Responsiveness through Responsive Process Management (RPM). |
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Savvion Acquisition - Part IDr. Bates, CTO of Progress Software shares the reasoning behind Progress Software’s entry into the business process management (BPM) marketplace through the acquisition of Savvion. |
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Savvion Acquisition - Part IIDr. Ketabchi, founder and CEO of Savvion, and Dr. Bates, CTO of Progress Software, discuss the recent acquisition, Progress Software’s entry into the business process management (BPM) marketplace, and why organizations must evolve their business to be highly response, dynamic and predictive. |
