Actional Solutions
Progress® Actional® solutions provide complete business transaction visibility, security, and control in the runtime environment as well as service quality and validation in pre-production. These solutions meet the challenges of keeping today's distributed, interconnected applications up and running reliably.
Financial Services
One financial services company with a focus on providing student loans and administering college savings plans developed a SOA infrastructure that connected its Web interfaces for customers to back-end, mainframe loan-origination and loan-servicing systems. In order to bring services under control and enable service rationalization and reuse, they used Progress® Actional® for SOA Operations to gain Web service control, better governance, and distributed SOA management.
Hospitality
Provide end-to-end visibility across the reservation process, and increase revenues and customer satisfaction.
The window of opportunity around each travel, lodging or leisure reservation is finite. Your business must find a way to prioritize service levels for different channels in order to improve look-to-book ratios. With end-to-end visibility across the reservation process, Progress Actional for business transaction assurance can help you increase revenues and deliver extraordinary experiences to customers.
Telecommunications
Accelerate order delivery, and diagnose and react to order fallout before revenue is impacted.
Industry analysts have stated that more than 25% of consumer orders are lost, stalled, or inaccurate. This not only results in lost revenue and increased operational costs, it diminishes the customer experience and pushes customers to your competition. Progress Actional provides end-to-end visibility across heterogeneous applications, with no impact to existing applications and processes. No matter what’s causing leakage bad data, system errors or misaligned processes, Actional can help you identify the problem and quickly resolve it.
Business Transaction Assurance
End-to-End Visibility of Your Critical Transactions
Maximizing revenue and productivity starts with business transaction assurance. Every organization has mission-critical business processes, such as placing an order. These business-critical transactions are often at risk because they typically rely on distributed, interconnected applications. What's more, these distributed applications often span systems, databases, and middleware from multiple vendors. They also often reside in different locations and are owned by different groups. Progress® Actional® Enterprise for lifecycle business transaction assurance can assure that business transactions execute smoothly and efficiently, and support your business goals. Actional's unique architecture enables automatic end-to-end monitoring with no coding and only microseconds of latency per network node, for lower IT costs, high-performance, and cost-effective scaling.
- Finding the Right Software for Managing Your Distributed Business-Critical Applications
- InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)
Risk Management
Monitor, Manage and Mitigate Risk
The risks that every enterprise faces can be operational in nature - resulting from infrastructure failure due to events such as an earthquake or fire, or partner or supplier risks due to transaction failure or fraud. To effectively manage risk, you need an accurate and timely flow of internal, customer and partner information and activities. Progress® Actional® solutions for web service security and compliance, transaction monitoring and alerting, and service-level management arm you with the tools to help monitor, manage and respond to business events as they happen so that you can reduce risks due to transaction failure.
- Application Portfolio Assessment Guide: Are Your Business-critical Applications at Risk?
- Reduce Order Fallout and Keep Profit in your Pocket
Service Level Management
Companies need service-level management to make sure they meet service-level agreements (SLAs) and optimize service delivery to improve business outcomes. However, this level of management is not easy to accomplish with today's distributed, interconnected applications because they execute on heterogeneous systems in different locations. Actional's automatic, end-to-end transaction monitoring and policy-based alerting enable you to understand and manage processes to meet SLAs and support business priorities. Actional automatically discovers and controls services and end-to-end business process flows. With Actional you will see, and get data on, how services are being delivered to customers and other end users.
- Operational Excellence for Distributed, Interconnected Applications
- Free Return on Investment (ROI) Assurance E-kit
Service-oriented Architecture (SOA)
The dynamic SOA world, consisting of many component services that can be recombined and reused, gives rise to potential SOA management issues and business risks. This loosely coupled, SOA infrastructure introduces new challenges, specific to SOA operations and management. By nature, SOAs span multi-vendor infrastructure, including different application servers, databases, and network devices, so for an SOA to serve the business well, each of these must be monitored and managed to ensure reliable performance and governance. Actional products are designed to meet these challenges and reduce the risk of SOA adoption, throughout the service lifecycle. Actional solutions are targeted to different business needs, allowing you to build and evolve a practical SOA solution for your business.
Application Performance Management
Companies supplement traditional application performance management solutions to provide business transaction assurance. Key features include automatic end-to-end visibility into real-time processing across many IT tiers, snapshot views of individual end-to-end transactions, and dynamic controls for improving processing to support business goals.
End-to-End Visibility
Actional has a lifecycle solution for optimizing the success of every transaction. Companies can start today with their existing runtime applications. Actional helps to quickly detect, diagnose, and react to problems such as slow or lost transactions before they impact the business. Just as important, it provides business analytics on real-time transactions and trends as well as runtime controls for fine-tuning IT operations to expedite key revenue opportunities.
Exception Management
Actional Enterprise offers a solution for managing exceptions in distributed, interconnected applications. It enables the support team to collaborate with the application development team for faster, accurate exception management and provides tools to help detect, diagnose, and resolve system, application, and data problems quickly.
Root Cause Analysis
When an availability or performance issue arises in production, Actional generates an alert and a flow map of the end-to-end individual "violating" transaction. This enables organizations to quickly trace back the problem to its root cause—eliminating hours of IT diagnostics.
Service-level Management
Actional enables companies to meet SLAs and manage services to support business goals. With policy-based alerting tools, users can set service alert thresholds and define service behavior for dynamic IT management. Actional also provides business analytics about runtime operations and controls for changing process behavior, for example, to give high-value customers priority service.
Service Quality and Validation
Actional enables pre-production teams to accelerate development and consistently produce high-quality services for reliable runtime operations. It provides tools for faster, easier unit, functional, load, compliance, regression, and acceptance testing; understanding service behavior through interaction and visualization; and enforcing design-time policy compliance—all without deep knowledge of XML.
Transaction Monitoring and Alerting
Actional Flow Mapping™ provides end-to-end visibility across distributed, interconnected applications to help administrators understand what's happening, or not happening, in the network. It also generates policy-based alerts and flow maps of "violating" transactions to support early detection of performance and availability issues.
SOA Management
Actional's lifecycle SOA management solution enables development teams to produce high-quality services consistently, to avoid runtime issues, and provides SOA operators with visibility, security, and control of the activities of services and end-to-end business-critical processes. With Actional companies can assure business transaction success, optimize business outcomes, and keep their SOAs secure and compliant.
SOA Governance
Actional provides organizations with lifecycle governance. Design-time policy authoring and checking ensure services comply with industry and corporate standards, and perform well in production. Runtime governance provides automatic transaction visibility, monitoring, and policy creation and tracking—elements that are critical to process adherence, measurement, and enforcement. Integration with registries and repositories augments governance by controlling rogue services, enabling sharing of policy information, and updating the registry service metadata with runtime service metadata.
SOA Security and Compliance
With Actional Enterprise, experts centrally create and manage security and compliance policies and apply them across interconnected, distributed applications for consistent enforcement and less risk. It offers robust security across heterogeneous platforms and Web services standards.
