01/29/2008

Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), a global supplier of application infrastructure software used to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications, today announced the availability of the Progress(R) Actional(R) 7.1 SOA management product family.

ebizQ received the following:

With unique, new capabilities, Actional is now the industry's only SOA and Web services management product family that can provide unified visibility within existing business process management (BPM) solutions, and beyond the edges of BPM processes into middleware and services. This ability to automatically connect the business process context to the underlying SOA infrastructure is a key requirement of a SOA governance strategy.

The Actional SOA management product family provides best-in-class policy-based visibility, security, and control for services, middleware, and business processes.

While today's BPM vendors bundle some governance features with their offering, these silo-like features fall-short when the business process involves other IT systems and services. Complete governance requires that processes, services, and policies are able to be managed in the context of one another, and not as separate silos. Actional 7.1 addresses this critical requirement and provides users with the ability to monitor, analyze, and relate activity occurring both within and beyond the edges of existing BPM processes.

Dan Foody, vice president of Actional Products, Progress Software comments: "As SOA makes its way more deeply into the fabric of enterprise infrastructures, the ability to increase visibility, governance, and security becomes increasingly important. With this release, Actional is the only SOA management solution on the market today that provides visibility and control that can span both BPM solutions and an SOA infrastructure across an enterprise."

Actional 7.1 provides BPM users and SOA architects with:

• Visibility into the dependencies between the business process steps and other services so that, as either processes or services are versioned or changed, the impact of the changes is always clear. The Actional automatic discovery feature always keeps information accurate, even allowing users to compare how processes change from day-to-day.



• Insight into performance and behavior of BPM call-outs so as to uncover unexpected behavior and be able to quickly identify the root cause of problems affecting the business process. Users can set thresholds for alerts for process slow-downs, or assess how specific services are impacting the execution of the overall process.



• Control over process policies allows users to apply policies to processes (e.g. "audit all steps for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance") without having to know the complete set of services that support the process. And, as services or the process changes over time, the policy enforcement will automatically adjust with no manual re-configuration.

Out of the box, Actional integrates seamlessly with Lombardi TeamWorks, with concrete plans to provide native support for additional BPM solutions. Integration is already underway with BPM offerings from Software AG and Fujitsu. In addition, Actional 7.1 includes an SDK that allows 3rd parties to add support for other BPM or SOA infrastructure products.

Additional features include support for a non-XML payload data, allowing users to inspect and analyze message content in existing services such as Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and Enterprise JavaBean(TM) (EJB). This means customers can look at legacy services in the context of a business process.