Actional Solutions

Banking

In the wake of the financial crisis, banks need to find a way to rebuild customer trust and loyalty, minimize attrition and maximize wallet share. But, customer experience can be a hard-to-manage beast, as it spans multiple channels, services, transactions, and interactions. With business transaction assurance and responsive operations, banks can drive trust, loyalty, and referral behavior --- and, ultimately, profitable and sustainable growth.

• Regaining Bank Customer Trust Through Business Transaction Assurance
• Actional on the Mainframe for Banking

Communications

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.

• Reduce Order Fallout
• Forrester TEI Study - Communications and Media Services

Learn how Progress® Actional® is helping businesses achieve operational responsiveness by addressing their needs in:

• Business Transaction Assurance
  Actional is a proven business transaction assurance solution that will quickly identify, resolve, and even prevent lost, stalled, or invalid transactions from occurring. With Actional our users can pinpoint the exact business process step, system, service, or operation that is causing a particular issue so that immediate action can be taken. In addition, Actional has a low total cost of ownership (TCO), and won't impose high costs or a heavy resource burden on the IT infrastructure.
  
  • 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.
    
    To learn more, download the guide Finding the Right Software for Managing Your Distributed Business-Critical Applications.
    
    
  • Application Performance Management
    Companies look to Progress Actional to supplement performance and availability requirements not met by their application performance management solution, but critical to optimizing application success. Using Actional our customers have deep visibility into message payloads, and they can isolate issues within a single, unique, end-to-end transaction. What's more, Actional's intuitive dashboard displays multi-dimensional business metrics.
    
    To learn more, download the Gartner Magic Quadrant on Application Performance Monitoring.
    
    
• Risk Management
  Every organization faces many types of risk. The challenge is to find ways to manage risk effectively so that businesses can get an accurate and timely flow of internal, customer and partner information and activities. Progress Actional delivers the tools required to monitor, manage and respond to events that can dictate how well your company manages risk.
  
  • 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.
    
    To learn more, replay the webinar 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.

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.