Business Making Progress

What I Learned from Bank CMOs

 

 

 

Earlier this month I attended American Banker’s Financial Services Marketing Symposium in New York. There were a variety of sessions that covered topics such as customer centricity, the role of social media and mobile channels and how to create a differentiated customer experience. All were informative and interesting.

 

As everyone in the industry knows, banks are feeling the (sometimes conflicting) pressures of regulatory requirements and having to differentiate themselves in a highly commoditized market. Mark Hendrix, SVP, Director of Marketing at Fifth Third Bank echoed recent regulatory requirements including Durbin, Reg E, Card Reform, and Dodd-Frank amendment – which alone has 1200 provisions written into it.  

 

According to Hendrix, banks are reaching the end of the golden era, they need to change the playing field by embracing the consideration of customer engagement, including all processes, services and events impacting their banking activity. He's right: they need to be more operationally responsive. And on the flight home, one of the points I continued to think about was his sentiment that what is driving the balance sheet is the interaction with the customer.... giving them the right answer in the right moment.

 

This encapsulates what banks need to do to stay competitive, increase customer loyalty, and grow revenue.  Just as our customers know, Progress can help.  

 

Banks Need Transaction-Level Insight Into Mainframe Systems to Meet New Transparency Demands

Recently I participated in the first installment of a webinar series  hosted by Bank Systems and Technology. I was joined by Greg MacSweeney of Bank Systems & Technology and analyst Gareth Lodge of Celent, and we discussed the need for banks to have transaction-level insight into mainframe systems to meet customer, partner and internal demands.

We are living in an increasingly complex world, especially in the financial services space where regulations continue to tighten. Banks must increase analysis to meet this heightened demand for reporting and compliance, and to do this we need real-time access and visibility into all transactional data. As Gareth said during our discussion, “Mark Twain said we can count on two things in life, death and taxes, and now we have a third: regulation.”

In addition to meeting these new requirements, customers are increasingly expecting immediate and detailed response and communication from their bank. However, this type of service requires access to transactional-level data in real-time. This is a multi step process and is not automated, so how do we get it done in a timely matter for the customer especially when this data is hard to find and difficult to interpret?

Many banks still maintain complex system architectures comprised of old and new mainframes- many of which are very difficult to access and navigate. It’s like operating in the dark, where there is very little transparency, creating frustration for IT departments.

In the future, we hope to see banks address some of these challenges with new technology. In order to meet new regulatory demands, banks need access to transactional level data, which will improve responsiveness and ultimately customer service. However, finding transactional level data on the mainframe and being able to act upon it poses quite a challenge from a business and operational perspective.

So how do we do that? Stay tuned for my next post, highlighting second installment of our webinar series. I welcome your comments here, as well.

SOA. It’s back… but it’s got more sparkle.

I’ve been working in high-tech marketing roles for over 20 years now and every time some new marketing collateral comes across my desk and “I get it”, I get excited. As a matter of fact, my first job in a high tech company was as a marketing assistant to an R&D group at BBN Systems and Technologies. They were introducing a very innovative product called BBN Slate which was a multi-media editor for Unix. Because my previous jobs involved word processing (Wang), spreadsheet analysis (Lotus), and creating pretty charts (DEC/VMS – yes, really), “I got it” and I was committed to championing it. I loved every minute of it. Well, in 2007 I was tasked to optimize the Progress Software website for SOA. We already had great traction for the enterprise service bus (ESB), but not specifically for service-oriented architecture (SOA). Well, “I got it”, got going and started optimizing for SOA Infrastructure – a popular long tail term at the time - less than two months later. As a matter of fact, this blog was once the SOA Infrastructure blog.

In January of 2009, Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton group published the blog post SOA is Dead; Long Live Services. The industry had a lot of fun with that. Now, I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but suddenly Progress stopped talking about SOA and they asked me to change the name of this blog. I was sad, I admit it.

This responsive business integration diagram was taken from a presentation by Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Enterprise Infrastructure. Listen to the archive.

Well yesterday I saw some sparkle. We announced our new Responsive Business Integration (RBI) suite. Truth be told, I’ve known about it for a few months because I had to post the content and work on my SEO plan. I know it’s not nice to play favorites, but I was delighted to see my favorite Progress technology/products back in the game – Actional, DataXtend SI and Sonic. And, I’ve concluded that the RBI suite is SOA pimped up! It’s taking the existing service and application foundation most enterprises already have (or are building) and it’s enhancing it with semantics, policy management and mediation. The Progress RBI suite is going to allow businesses to decouple systems which will give them improved visibility, agility and the ability to change.

Read more about Progress Responsive Business Integration. And check out a great presentation by Progress customer Southern Union Company. They built their enterprise integration strategy around RBI and didn't even know it.

For the lack of a better term, do you think RBI it is our next-generation SOA? Give us your comments!

Belgacom and the Case for Business-oriented integration in Communications Providers

It is no secret that the telecommunications industry has been exploring various ways to tackle issues such as declining ARPU (average revenue per user) and increasing customer churn over the last five years. The keys to proactively addressing these issues are agility and responsiveness. For example, responsiveness around customer service – to make customers feel they have a personalized valuable service – which reduces churn; and agility -- around launching new and compelling services rapidly – to increase ARPU.

Despite this quest for the Holy Grail, many communications providers have failed to lay sufficient foundations. While there may be some useful technologies deployed in an attempt to provide an agile and responsive integration platform – these technologies have often failed to deliver what is needed by the business. SOA is a prime case in point. While SOA technology has been successful in many ways, it has also led to a lot of disappointments. Often the business was sold on the promise that SOA would make operations more agile and responsive.  However, what resulted was technology for technologists that looked like plumbing and was daunting and too generic to the business.

Business people want solutions that can deliver visibility to problems and opportunities – such as key business events (e.g., an opportunity to sell a new service, based on context or location) or process failures (e.g. persistent dropped calls for an important customer) – so that problems can be responded to quickly and opportunities taken. The business also wants solutions that can enforce business-level policies and service-level agreements, as well as solutions that can interconnect services at a “semantic level” – not just plumb data together. In other words – the business wants to deal in business-level concepts, and be assured that the underlying complexity will be managed by the system.

Today’s announcement that Belgium operator Belgacom is transforming its business and IT integration programme (more information here) represents a huge step forward for the telecommunications industry. Belgacom is clearly focused around being more responsive to the needs of their customers in order to tackle issues such as churn through improved integration. By selecting the right business integration foundation to support their IT strategy, Belgacom has taken a critical step forward in a long-term strategy to become more operationally responsive to their customers.

Due to the nature of the economic times we live in, it is vital that the telecommunications industry as a whole ensures that they have the best possible integration technology in place. Only then will operators be able to enhance their customer experience management offerings to attract and retain their business customers, differentiate their offerings, and lower their service costs.

 

Red Flags in Morning, Firms Take Warning

A pattern is emerging within new financial services regulations where regulators and financial services firms deploy monitoring technology to "red flag" potential issues such as risk, position limits, errors and manipulation. The "red flags" raised would then alert the relevant personnel or authorities.

In the case of the Volcker Rule, prohibiting banks from proprietary trading and investing in or sponsoring hedge funds or private equity funds, the authorities would use a three tiered approach (http://tinyurl.com/2bh9ot3).  First "tripwires", such as the length of time a trader holds a position, its size or riskiness, would alert banks’ compliance departments  who would (#2) quiz the trader on the nature of the position. And (#3)regulators that keep inspectors on banks’ premises would see the tripwires and monitor both traders and compliance departments.

Over at the CFTC, regulators are looking at a similar approach to monitoring and controlling position limits on products such as oil and metals with a "points" system that would give the CFTC monthly reports that it could use to red-flag traders with large positions (http://tinyurl.com/2ugbdh6).

The tracking and red flag approach is the latest step in increased monitoring of trading operations with the ability to take response before it’s too late. At Progress, we have been advocating using monitoring and surveillance technology to help catch inside trading and avoid fat fingered trading errors for years. With new regulations, monitoring becomes not only mandated but more complicated. Red flags are likely to be flying all over the place within as little as months, both inside and outside financial services firms, presenting a fine opportunity for our Responsive Process Management software solution.

As the financial services world becomes more compliant, the ability to manage red flags becomes more critical. Every process within a financial services firm must be scrutinized, from trade entry to risk management, to analyse and understand internal and external events. This take sophisticated technology. This is where Progress Software's RPM software fits in. According to technology research firm Ovum: "Unless an organization has already made a significant investment in creating an operational responsiveness solution around best of breed products, it will be worth seriously considering the competitive advantage and improved effectiveness that could be achieved by deploying RPM."

Ovum noted in a Technology Audit note that multiple technologies are required to gain a comprehensive insight and respond more rapidly to changes to the environment. These include: business process management (BPM) to model, implement, and execute the processes; business analytics to determine how effectively the processes are working; complex event processing (CEP) to understand the implications of many streams of internal and external events; business rules management to determine the appropriate actions for a given set of conditions and variables; and visibility into end-to-end transactions to track and audit their progress.

The interrelationships between all of these components and the vast amount of information that has become available must be understood before its impact on processes can be ascertained and appropriate tuning performed. In other words, RPM is the answer.

RPM can monitor an increasing number of information feeds, both within or external to the organization, then apply business policy and governance rules, then automatically tune the  established process or alert a human decision-maker (if necessary) and present him/her with current, relevant information on which to base the most appropriate response.

According to Ovum: "All of these individual capabilities already exist (at different levels of maturity), but the cost and complexity of integrating these into an effective business solution is beyond the means of most organizations. Hence Ovum believes that the requirement identified by Progress represents a genuine market opportunity." Well said. 

 

When it comes to Integration, Contracts Make all the Difference.

It may seem odd to talk about contracts and SOA in the same sentence, but without them experienced enterprise architects and integration developers understand the negative consequences that will ripple through the business.

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) requires establishing contracts between its participants. The first or most basic SOA contract provision concerns what formats and protocols are used. When two service participants, a provider and a consumer, establish a contract, it must start out with some protocol and format artifact (or transport and data-level semantic), such as an XSD and the associated WSDL describing the interface between that consumer and producer. These decisions establish the beginnings of interoperability, specifically how the first-level pin-outs get wired together.

Beyond this basic level, IT professionals tend to think about contracts in two broad areas: the service-level agreement (SLA) and security. For IT, an SLA usually specifies scale, response time, and availability: for example, handling 10,000 requests per second with a response time of less than 500 milliseconds, and availability to four 9s, or 99.99 percent uptime. From a security standpoint, a contract covers four or five areas.

In installment #7 of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series, Hub Vandervoort delves into the sixth point of mediation - Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Privacy/Protection. But rather than providing a comprehensive account of the idea of QoS and QoP, the video podcast and technical paper offer a high-level overview of some capabilities within Sonic ESB by itself and in association with Actional, which is largely built into the ESB infrastructure, and how those come together to create the foundation of QoS\QoP—trust and commitment —required for effective contracts.

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Check out all of the Enterprise Integration Whiteboard Series white papers and videos here!

Actional 8.2 Released

It’s a great time to be in New England. Bright fall colors frame every road as the trees that provide refreshing shade during the blistering summer days now provide a canvas of brilliant color. Nestled among the trees that line Route 3 north you’ll see corporate headquarters for Progress Software, a leader in Business Transaction Management software with Progress Actional.

Actional 8.2 was just released and continues to show significant advancements in supporting enterprises that need to ensure the success of every single important business transaction. As the heterogeneity of IT infrastructures increases, Actional can help organizations achieve this level of assurance by extending visibility into transactions that traverse environments that include Apache CXF and JBoss ESB. And if improving the customer experience and the performance of mission-critical applications is on your radar, be sure to visit the Actional website for details on expanded alerting—and other enhancements. This release is targeted for organizations that are looking to work more intelligently and with a laser-focus on quality and efficiency.

So does the release of Actional 8.2 trump New England’s fall foliage? With a true Bostonian accent I’ll just say, “When driving one’s cahr through Hahrvahd yahrd, one can rest assured that transactions are running smoothly, application perfahrmance is optimized and the customah experience is at an all time high!”

Gain Actionable Insight Into Your Operations at Summit 2010

The Progress Software Summit 2010 brings together the visionaries and experts who are applying today’s proven technologies that will help companies achieve operational responsiveness. Learn how applying business solutions such as Responsive Process Management (RPM) will help you gain agility, reduce risk and achieve 20/20 foresight. Transform the way you do business.

At the Progress Software Summit, you will:

• Learn how you can make better business decisions by achieving real-time visibility and actionable insight.
• Connect with your business peers and innovators, and share how you are - or are not - achieving operational responsiveness.
• See the latest innovations in business process management, complex event processing and more.

JOIN US IN A CITY NEAR YOU!

November 2, 2010 HUDSON NEW YORK 356 West 58th Street New York, NY	November 3, 2010 W HOTEL CHICAGO 172 West Adams Street Chicago, IL	November 10, 2010 BENTLY RESERVE 301 Battery Street San Francisco, CA
Our New York event begins at 11:00 am and ends at 5:30 pm, and is followed by a Cocktail Reception. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the New York event will be Larry Kudlow: Mr. Kudlow is host of CNBC’s primetime “The Kudlow Report” and co-host of “The Call”. He is also the host of “The Larry Kudlow Show” which broadcasts each Saturday on WABC Radio. He is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of American Abundance: The New Economic and Moral Prosperity. Learn more >	Our Chicago event begins at 11:30 am and ends at 5:45 pm, and is followed by a Blackhawks game. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the Chicago event will be Dan Hampton: A first-round draft pick of the Chicago Bears in 1979, where he continued to play 12 years as a defensive lineman, Dan Hampton is an engaging football Hall of Fame personality who is well-known and liked for his anecdotal and motivational speaking style. Learn more >	Our San Francisco event begins at 11:30 am and ends at 4:40 pm, and is followed by a Yacht Cruise. Hear from Progress plus industry expert John Rymer, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. Our SPECIAL GUEST at the New York event will be Richard Karlgaard: Rich Karlgaard has a unique vantage point on the trends driving the business and investment climates. He is the publisher of Forbes magazine, where he writes a bi-weekly column. Mr.Karlgaard is author of the Forbes book, Life 2.0: How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness. Learn more >

Delivering Operational Responsiveness

We've already learned that operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the tools and information they need to respond to the unexpected, thereby allowing them to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. We've also learned why it's so hard to achieve. Now, how do we help deliver it?

Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software

Watch Part 3 of our 7 part video series. In this video, Delivering Operational Responsiveness, John explains how we've brought together three proven technologies that help companies achieve operational responsiveness – business transaction assurance, complex event processing (CEP) and business process management (BPM). All these powerful technologies are further enhanced with business rules and analytics.

The best part? You drive. A business control panel will give you the ability to gain real-time visibility into business events, immediately sense and respond to changing conditions, and achieve continuous process improvement.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM) and learn how Agent O applies RPM to tackle credit card fraud in real time. You can also follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

What Is Operational Responsiveness?
Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?

 

Are you a sitting duck or one that will respond immediately to threats?

While many organisations are being ‘cautiously optimistic’ about what the future holds, the realities of today’s tough business environment could leave them as sitting ducks, according to Rick Reidy, CEO at Progress Software. They might take consolation that they’re in the same pond, but when interest rates in Japan hit near-zero, banks continue to fail and mistakes can lead to a ‘flash crash’, the pond is not a safe place to be. Businesses may have money, but fear and uncertainty is holding back decision-making – we await further regulation and want to know the consequences of recent government changes.

 
Listening to Rick’s keynote at our UK business summit (#progresswsummit, if you want to follow on twitter), in the impressive surrounding of Chelsea Football Club’s ground, London, it seems most of the audience agrees – it’s not good enough to sit around and wait to see if growth returns, and you cannot grow simply by cutting costs. You have to take control of your own ‘growth agenda’, as Rick put it. Businesses that want to survive the next five years need better visibility, through putting processes in place that enable them to react quickly to meet customer demands, adapt to market changes and take advantage of new opportunities. As Rick has advised, businesses need to act on up to the minute information so that leaders can make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight.
 
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll already know that we call this ‘operational responsiveness’: the ability to sense and respond to customer and market changes so that organisations can move quickly to meet challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. 
 
Rick has talked about what this means in the airline industry: the notion of irregular operations has become a weekly reality as companies face intense market pressure, striking staff and disruption from natural phenomenon. ‘Swivel chair’ communication between operational areas is no longer good enough. To react quickly enough, they need responsive processes in place that can help them maintain services and inform customers, almost as-it-happens. If they don’t, they will face massive fines, lost custom and damaged reputation – risks no company can afford at present.
 
We’ll be hearing more from Gordon Penfold, CTO at British Airways, about their approach to becoming operationally responsive to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. Watch this space for my take on his talk…

 

Stamford Bridge, here we come

Tomorrow sees Progress Software taking over Stamford Bridge, home ground to the world-famous Chelsea Football Club. We’re not just there to check out the players’ dressing rooms – we are being joined by James Caan, of Dragons' Den fame, as well as the great and the good of the UK business community, to discuss how businesses can start to make decisions based on foresight, not hindsight, in their operations.

Gordon Penfold, Chief Technology Officer at British Airways, will be sharing his insight on ‘operational foresight’, revealing how the organization has set itself up to better deal with the irregular operations that have become a fact of life in the last year. And Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, will be sharing his views on where the next wave of truly responsive business management is coming from, and which trends to watch for. And Progress' own Chief Executive Officer, Rick Reidy, will be giving a keynote too.

I'll be there, speaking in one session but also blogging and tweeting from the event. So watch this space for the latest updates.

For those of you attending, I look forward to seeing you there.

www.progresssoftwaresummit.com

 

Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?

We've already learned that operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the tools and information they need to respond to the unexpected, thereby allowing them to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. But why is it so hard to achieve?

Watch Part 2 of our 7 part video series featuring Dr. John Bates, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Corporate Development at Progress Software. In this 1 minute, 30 second video, Why Is Operational Responsiveness So Hard To Achieve?, John explains why many companies struggle to achieve operational responsiveness. He points out that the lack of real-time visibility is just one key reasons.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM) and learn how Agent O tackles credit card fraud in real time. Follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.

Enjoy past videos of this seven part series:

• What Is Operational Responsiveness?

How Being Complex Makes Transaction Assurance Simpler

I have been seeing an increasing amount on interest in the marriage between Business Transaction Management (BTM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). On July 29^th Dr Dobbs Journal published an article called Complex Event Processing: IT Liberator or Over-Engineering Hell? This article was about the synergy of BTM and CEP (although I felt it was rather biased towards one company). Also, last week Jean Pierre Garbani at Forrester published this blog in which he discussed the evolution towards BTM and CEP working together.

Business Transaction Management is a rapidly growing area of Application Performance Management (APM). BTM enables users to look into the transaction flows within their business and ensure everything is running as expected. BTM enables problems in transaction flows to be discovered – such as a bottleneck in an important business process. The really appealing aspect of BTM is it can do this without the need to change the applications in the business; BTM can “discover the transaction flows” by tapping non-intrusively into the flows going through application servers, middleware buses, business process management systems and other systems within the environment. Over time, BTM can build up a picture of the environment’s business flows, look inside the transactions and flag up immediately problems that can really hurt the business.  Thus BTM works really well in legacy environments – not just modern SOA environments. And of course it appeals to business executives and operations users – not just IT users.

Complex Event Processing is the ability to correlate events flowing through a business  - to identify patterns in real-time. These patterns might indicate opportunities and/or threats to the business that have just happened, are in the process of happening or are likely to happen right now. Events are occurrences in the business, such as stock market quotes in trading, call data records being generated in communications or packages changing location in logistics. An example of a real-time opportunity is a trading “statistical arbitrage” opportunity – to sell one instrument and buy another at a micro profit; another is the ability to upsell something to a customer who has just purchased an item on their credit card – based on their spending and buying patterns, their location and context. Threats to be detected include risk exceeding a certain key level in a bank or gaming fraud occurring in a casino. This kind of business level visibility and immediate response also appeals to business users as well as IT.

Listening to the descriptions of BTM and CEP, does it sound like there is a little overlap? Well there is some. What BTM is really good at is non-intrusively discovering process endpoints and the events they exchange – and then tracking these events. What CEP is really good at is correlating complex real-time business events in real-time, including arbitrary user-defined patterns, which can evolve over time as the business evolves. So it makes perfect sense to put these capabilities of BTM and CEP together. For BTM this strengthens the real-time correlation and pattern detection capabilities. For CEP this enables discovery of services without the need to do expensive and time-consuming instrumentation of the environment.

At Progress we have two leading products in the BTM and CEP categories: Actional and Apama. We believe that BTM and CEP capabilities are converging for certain business use cases, so as part of our Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite we now provide seamless integration between these capabilities. Of course RPM does much more than that. More on that later!

Know Your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud

This is the title of a session being presented at Exchange Online 2010 by Gary Cink on September 15th at 9:45 am. In this presentation, Gary will demonstrate how some of the complimentary Progress' products enhance the OpenEdge experience for business transaction management (BTM). BTM is a critical component in the new IT/Business relationship. Progress® Actional®, Progress's first class BTM product, translates data relating to an underlying IT estate into information that is relevant to various business stakeholders including operations staff, application development, quality assurance, and security & compliance personnel. With this knowledge the various stakeholders can make informed decisions, often proactively, to ensure the success of every critical business transaction necessary for the day-to-day running of a business. Actional also offers the capabilities of automating operational Service Level Agreements (SLA) against this estate, thus preventing issues or alerting appropriate staff to problems before they have even happened.

Learn more about Gary and this technical session on our View From The Edge blog.

You can also read the white paper SLAS: 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 the results of this survey, 76% of respondents report that SLAs are critical to winning new business. Yet, 84% are unable always to meet their SLAs.

Mission Operational Responsiveness: Progress RPM and Fraud Prevention

Imagine that you’re a Fortune 500 diversified bank. You have millions of customers worldwide using your credit cards to make purchases every day.

As a diversified bank, your customers expect great value and convenience every time they complete a transaction with you. To retain existing customers and obtain new ones, you are committed to delivering a convenient experience that meets your customers’ high expectations. Whether they have a credit card or savings account, you want their interactions to be seamless as they occur through your website, at ATMs, through merchants and in your branch locations.

Sometimes, things go wrong.

Diversified banks must balance delivering a convenient experience that meets customers’ expectations while continuously monitoring transactions in an effort to prevent bank fraud.

Meet Agent O and relive his fraud prevention adventure as he strives to monitor millions of transactions, when suddenly things go awry. Watch him combat the Syndrome crime family when they hack into ACME Trading Company’s network, stealing thousands of credit card numbers.

Will the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite help Agent O stop the crime in time? Watch the video to find out, as the RPM suite is put to the test.

And then tell Progress how you can use RPM to become a business hero and enter to win an Apple iPad.

Operational Responsiveness for People

Last week met with a journalist (Dy.Editor, Murali) from a leading business newspaper in India (Hindu Business Line). We talked about many things that are at the top of my mind now- software products, future of IT industry, startups, middleware technology trends and, needless to say, Operational Responsiveness and our Responsive Process Management (RPM) strategy. Like I have been doing a lot lately, highlighted the visibility and control that RPM is enabling in a non-intrusive manner retaining all existing apps & solutions as is and still get the needed visibility across biz processes that span these applications. And get this without re-engineeirng any application. (A promise that has long been made by SOA but something that is not easy to realise without massive re-engineering to get services and automated business processes in place. So first order problems are solved by getting any re-engineering needed in place. But an organization's visibility and control needs are much beyond these first order problems).

As I was engrossed in explaining the value from RPM, this journalist posed a question from a completely different view. Asked if there is any way to track Operational Responsiveness of people? Anyway to get real-time visibility into the people part of the organizations. Not the time-sheet type tracking of who is doing what and for how long- but more of a semantic and collaboration enabling type of tracking. Of trying to capture who is "thinking" about what at any given point. And use this information to trigger collaboration. If I see a colleague of mine is presently thinking about a particular problem area, and I have inputs, I can share it knowing that he/she is going to consider/consume it right away.And do this in an RPM manner, with visibility, alerts and workflows.

Now, this was an interesting thought. I know organizations have been working on knowledge management and collaboration approaches and tools for long. In spite of very widespread penetration of Wikis, networking tools and social style collaboration in organizations, still not easy to realize the collaboration organizations could use. Often different people go thru the solving same problems each solving it again without realising someone has already solved it. Would Operational Responsiveness help here? Can the needed "visibility" into people and what they are presently working on be enabled? And then, build the "responsiveness" and "control" (read, collaboration here) capabilities. This was the gist of the journalists thought. Very interesting. Especially when he brought this up as I was talking about how RPM enables seamless and effortless visibility and control in an organization (essentially machines, applications, business functions, processes and other manifestations of machine processing- but none involving people in the organization and what they are presently thinking about!).

Pushing the Envelope on Application Performance Monitoring

The verdict is in. Gartner released its first ever "Magic Quadrant for Application Performance” Monitoring (APM). With the release of this quadrant, they’ve now confirmed another “perfect storm” -- the convergence of application complexity, making management more difficult ,and business, driving IT operations to become more application-centric. The bottom-line: how does IT operations keep up with the ever-winding web of applications? How do they ensure the success of every single important business transaction as it traverses through databases, middleware, application servers, and external services?

The Magic Quadrant does a nice job of defining the 5 dimensions of APM. The most interesting were “end-user experience monitoring” and “user-defined transaction profiling” --f ocusing on the user experience. What a concept: a clear focus on how customers are being treated, how satisfied they are or aren’t, actually trying to understand if they’re having a good or bad experience! That said, Progress Actional business transaction assurance (BTA) has been a market leader focused on these key disciplines through patented technology that enables teams to automatically discover and model transaction flows and manage and control user outcome. And with the integration points into BPM of the latest release, Actional BTA pushes the envelope of APM by including both approaches to transaction profiling: automated transaction-centric event correlation for business processes that include automated and manual steps, and, as always, transaction-tagging.

Get the Gartner MQ 2010 APM Report >

Real-time. Do you take it for granted?

I can’t help but notice all the references to “real-time” lately—real-time AWD, real-time ABS, real-time computing, real-time communication, real-time arts, Real Time with Bill Maher, etc.—I even clicked on realtime.com… I got the message “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” and the only thing I can say is that I was annoyed, in real-time! Seriously, if you search on “real-time”, Google estimates 1,850,000,000 results.

The use of real-time isn’t new to me. I’ve been listening to Progress talk about it since earlier than 2004. Progress had the bad (at least I think so) habit of organizing their development, marketing and sales efforts around how we are organized as a company. Sometime around 2004 the division that I worked in was actually called the Real-time Division (I have a hat to prove it). We went so far as to structure our website under www.progress.com/realtime/. This division developed, marketed and sold our ObjectStore and Apama product lines. Today we’re organizing ourselves more closely to solutions and products so when people tell me about a “page not found” when they visit someplace under ~/realtime, a shiver runs up my back and gives me a headache. For anyone who’s worked on the web side of the business, change is not always good.

Anyway, I digress... In some cases, I do take “real-time” for granted. When I press the brake of my car, I expect my car to stop in real-time—even if I really get thrown into a tailspin because of all the rain around here. I bought an AWD car a few years ago and I’m apparently naïve because I don’t know of a button I need to push to have real-time AWD. Real-time computing, now that’s a different story. I bet many technologists might not take “real-time” for granted. Do you? Wikipedia notes that early references to real-time computing were in reference to high performance. When the Real Time Division first started talking about “real-time”, it was related to event processing—complex event processing—the ability to monitor, analyze and act on business events as they occur. Behind most transactions is a database and as most of us know, updating a field/row of the supported database isn’t always real-time. It may only take a second but we all know what a second can feel like when we’re trying to win the Gold, selling or buying stock at the best price, or reacting to the brake lights blasting in front of us. Apama’s technology doesn’t wait for the database to update, it “automagically” processes the event WHEN IT HAPPENS—learn more about Apama.

Last week we announced the launch of the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. This solution suite presents “real-time visibility” as a core feature/benefit of the Progress RPM suite. When I first started reading the content for the launch, I associated Real-time Visibility to our Apama technology but it’s actually associated with multiple Progress technologies—Apama (for visibility into events), Actional (end-to-end visibility into transactions) and Savvion (visibility into processes). It made sense, at least to me, because it’s about “seeing” how transactions are operating as they occur—from design time through runtime. In this case, I do not have to take real-time for granted, and it’s not automagic, because I’m looking at a dashboard that’s showing me exactly how an event is being processed. With Real-time Visibility, I can see (visualize) how the transaction is flowing and if there is a problem I can immediately respond and work to find a resolution.

To be honest, nothing I do is really time or mission-critical. And while I take for granted that my CMS is publishing our newest press release to our home page the minute it gets published, our marcom VP is not. While he’s tapping his foot behind me, I’m wishing I could bring up my “real-time visibility” console and see what’s causing the delay—is it the CMS, the network, what? In industries like capital markets, energy, insurance, and telecommunications, real-time visibility is the difference between increased revenue vs lost revenue, and happy customers vs miserable customers. With Real-time Visibility, you don’t have to take anything for granted.

It's About Quality... End-to-End Process Quality

Hey everyone! I haven't written in a while because I'm still getting used to my new role and am freshly back from a nice two-week vacation. Why does all the juicy stuff get released while I'm away? Anyway, I'm sure it's not about me (this time). [Apparently I have a lot to say! Sorry for the length of this post in advance. The short version is: 1) It's all about improving "business quality", and 2) Make sure to read the Gartner blog referenced below.]

I wanted to weigh in on this RPM thing... Last week we announced the launch of our Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. What's it about? I'll leave the "brochure-ware" posts to the marketing folks. I have been talking to many of our customers and field, and while there's some confusion about what it means... RPM's benefits are quite obvious.

It's all about the "quality of the business".

Now marketing may not like how I leave out all sorts of important words/phrases... like real-time business visibility, immediate sense & respond, or continuous process improvement. Those concepts are all very important but they sound very familiar.

What differentiates the Progress solution is that we're enabling, quickly and layered over your existing infrastructure, the ability to react in real-time to your business conditions and exceptions to more tightly control the quality of your business as your customers experience your service/products.

Don't get caught up in the words. Progress' offering is new (and IMO innovative). I know, the jury's out and we have to prove that. But trust me on this one... at least long enough to let me explain.

Let me start by pointing out that all other vendors that "already do that"... well they don't. Don't believe me? Believe Mark McDonald at Gartner. In a blog from February 2010 he points out:

"... in 2010 more than half of CIO's do not feel confident in their ability to achieve results when improving business processes."

If all these other vendors have had a solution for this problem in the market for five years, but 50% of CIO's still don't trust it, something's wrong with the solution.

We can argue this point back and forth for hours, as vendors, because we love our solutions and it's a totally unproductive waste of time. Of course I (usually) believe my stuff is better than others. If not, I should just go get a job with the other guys. Right?

So, let me share some personal thoughts on process quality, what it really means (from a consumer's perspective, my own experience with a bank on a recent transaction), and it's importance will be obvious. I'll not attempt to prove that the Progress® RPM suite is better than the others here... but I hope you'll leave with an understanding of our intent and some of the less obvious challenges companies face when trying to solve problems with their business process quality.

I recently used a government program to refinance a home through Wells Fargo Bank. It's a very paper heavy process. I had the original mortgage with Wells Fargo and since it was a government program, there wasn't any variability to the process. It's a coastal property, so they need to verify up-to-date flood insurance. Of course, since they held the original note on the property -- they had up-to-date flood insurance proof on file.

A few things struck me right away:

1. Even my mortgage broker had no idea what the process was like because it was a government program. He told me that he'd submit the information, and eventually something would happen.
2. The person who eventually called (couple weeks later) and asked for my insurance certificate (which, remember, they had on file -- and, yes I could have canceled the insurance, but I sent them the same proof they had on file, so my point stands.) didn't leave a phone number. Or an application tracking number. Or an email address. Just a fax number and a first name. It took me a few days to get to a fax machine, on which I left my phone number and email asking for a confirmation of receipt because I wanted to make sure we completed this step.
3. I got another call (from another person) to discuss the process and confirm the final information. The inbound caller ID didn't show my bank's name, so it went to voicemail. It took me a couple of days to return the call during which she called again. When we finally spoke, she handed me off to yet another number/person who I'd have to call if I had any questions when I received the closing package.
4. The closing package asked for the insurance certificate again. And, the loan amount was higher than my current balance. The HUD-1 I got had the same numbers, but they weren't explained anywhere. Having all the dysfunctional experiences above, I had very little confidence in the process and almost decided to scrap it. I had to call the call-center again. When I did they quickly and clearly answered my question and confirmed that they had the insurance info so didn't need it again.

Why did these things stick on my mind? In large part because they're unnecessary and affected my experience with the bank. Do I really want a company this sloppy and disorganized in charge of my money?

The process worked. But, the quality of the process left a lot to be desired. In left me feeling uncertain (as I mentioned, I almost didn't proceed) and it was inefficient for them. Multiple calls to the data center, answering questions that everyone would have and where the answers were readily available. And, before you think it's sloppy human process (the part about not leaving a return phone number with questions, etc.)... there are tells that can be used to recognize poor human process too (like tracking how many calls to the call-center occur per mortgage, and how long the average response time is to each time they ask me for information... and whether there is a correlation, etc.).

Process Visibility

Somewhere, someone in the bank knew the process. They had to. But that information wasn't shared-with or accessible-to my broker. He submitted the paperwork and told me I'd hear from someone.

If you worked with two banks... one said "we'll call you soon" and the other said "you'll hear from us by Tuesday, after that you'll get a package in the mail that you'll have to get notarized and return, the whole thing should take about 6 weeks, so by March, you'll be on the new rate" which would leave you with more confidence? Which is the better experience?

Companies need to be able to track the end-to-end business process. And, as Mark McDonald points out, they need to do that regardless of whether the process is embedded in their legacy systems, formally orchestrated in a BPM engine, or ad-hoc across distributed services (or all of the above!).

Frankly, it must be really hard to do, or more companies would do it. Was this process hard to track because it was part of a government program? Was it handled by different "systems" or teams for compliance reasons? Was there an external government processor that the bank integrated with and left the bank without a clear understanding of the SLA? Was the technology just not agile enough to meet the speed of the business? Said differently, the government was able to roll-out a refinance program faster than Wells Fargo's IT team could react, leaving Wells Fargo hanging with both the government and their frustrated customers. We all know the government is slow... is Wells Fargo's IT really slower?

Flood Insurance

This one baffles me. Aside from the fact that they already had the information they needed, it took me a few days because they wanted it via fax. I was uncertain because I thought maybe they needed something different than what they had, and was frustrated because I had no way to communicate with the person requesting the information.

I'm pretty organized. All my paperwork is scanned and searchable on my computer (and backed up!). Had I received an email request for information they would have had it in 5 minutes. Instead it took 5 days. That sounds like a compelling optimization. Someone has to care how quickly these things get processed (besides me and President Obama). Wasn't one of the early criticisms of these programs that they weren't being implemented quickly enough? After reading this story, do you wonder why?

Loan Amount

I was told it was a no-fee process, but the loan amount was way too high. I figured the bank didn't know what they were doing. A reasonable assumption based on my prior experience with the process. My call to the call center cost the bank money, and took more time. In truth, it was two calls. The first time I called they were too busy, and I waited then had to hang up. Why not just explain it clearly up front? Do they even know how many customers call with questions once receiving the paperwork? Do they know the length of the calls? Perhaps they can see the length, realize it's a quick question, and see if they can improve... again, it's not about the people or thought that goes into things. It's about sensing current business activities, and responding to patterns to improve the quality of the business.

Summary

Finally, I'm actually annoyed that I had to call the bank to see what the rates were. In fact, the bank should be scared of that as well. Imagine if I had called a competitor instead? Apparently the federal program I qualified for had been available for a while. Why wouldn't the bank have reached out to me? It would have impressed me, but also ensured I didn't call that competitor. In fact, this is a use case I worked on recently with an insurance company (different process, same idea).

Imagine being able to sense your customers' behavior and respond to their needs before they have a chance to look at a competitor?

Understanding the quality of the end-to-end business process and having the ability to take action based on events in real-time... that's Operational Responsiveness. It elevates the game and creates a barrier to entry against competitors. That's what the Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite is meant to deliver for our customers.

PRGS Announces the RPM Suite - A Convergence of BTA, BEP, and BPM

It’s been raining here in Massachusetts for 3 days straight, but today I got to add a NEW acronym to my arsenal...

Introducing RPM - Responsive Process Management

In case you missed it, a Progress Software press release went out this morning that announced the launch of our NEW Progress Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite. The Progress RPM suite brings together our best-in-class solutions for Business Process Management (BPM), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA), and Business Event Processing (BEP) (most commonly referred to as Complex Event Processing (CEP)). The Progress RPM suite will enable enterprises to achieve a higher level of business performance than previously possible. It is scheduled to launch in late April, and the market opportunity for this type of solution is expected to be greater than $10 billion [based on IDC Research*]. The release includes a quote from Maureen Fleming, program director of IDC's business process management and middleware research service:

“Over the past two years, one of the fastest-growing areas of software investment by enterprises has been to improve their situational awareness. Logically, the next step is broadening the focus to not only gain visibility into problems or opportunities but to rapidly respond. Enterprises will increasingly look for vendors that offer a knowledgeable and comprehensive approach to building this next generation of critical business applications."

It may sound like a pretty complicated implementation but core to the Progress Responsive Process Management suite is the Progress Control Tower™, a unified product dashboard, or GUI, that displays real-time alerts, interactive interfaces and tools. The Control Tower will provide users with the ability to view what is happening within their business and to improve it from a single source - thereby gaining greater ROI. It’s fully configurable, feature-rich, interactive framework delivers a wealth of relevant, KPIs and business information. What’s more, a powerful modeling environment enables new business processes to be rapidly created, modeled, monitored, controlled and improved dynamically.

To learn more, read our 7 page brochure and visit our website. We've also written the white paper Achieving Operational Responsiveness Through Responsive Process Management that you can register for.

Over the coming months, we’ll introduce more collateral, white papers, and webinars so stay tuned.

TTYL!

Poor Customer Service and Snoring Keep Me Awake...

Last night, like many weeknights, I pre-planned my escape by putting my phone in the guest room. As I entered the room and got ready for the one-click alarm set, I noticed that I had a new voice mail so I called in to check it. Here is what it said:

"Hello, This is an automated voice message from Jet Blue Airways for Pamela Gazley with important information about a change to your scheduled flight. Your flight has been canceled. We look forward to serving you. Goodbye."

My first response was "why?"; my second response was "which flight?" My 2nd response was a little silly because of the 4 flights I have scheduled for the next week, only one involved Jet Blue; however, what if there were others? Does Jet Blue Airways know that there are products out there that can improve their processes so that they can deliver better customer experiences? Does Jet Blue have any business analysts that might think, "hey, what if when we send out the automated voice message, we include the flight number, date of travel, and the reason for the cancellation"? I guess not because I was completely annoyed.

Now I don't work for Jet Blue but I'd bet that they have some kind of integrated infrastructure that would allow them to improve business processes. If this "automated message" knows my name (though pronounced wrong), it should know my flight number, the date of travel, and the reason for the cancellation. My advice to Jet Blue: learn more about business transaction assurance,  business process management (BPM), and give us a call because we can help you achieve operational efficiency and improve your customers' experience.

Celebrating the shadow of Punxsutawney Phil

As the week of Punxsutawney Phil’s appearance commences, I must admit I’m one of the few that is happy to hear we have another 6 weeks of winter to look forward to! Why you ask, well that means more skiing and an extended window of time until I have to start worrying. Worrying about when to apply “Step 1” nutrients to my lawn, about how much the voles and moles have destroyed my plants, and about whether or not I warded off the dreaded Dutch Elm disease with the systemic treatment that was applied last fall. Bottom line is I have a 6 week reprieve.

But... what if I could apply technology to my yard, garden and even the infrastructure of my home. What if I could apply some fundamental concepts like automatic discovery, monitoring, management and control, across my household infrastructure? The possibilities are endless. I could set up points of visibility at strategic points in my yard such as the base of my newly planted Double Pink Weeping Cherry and at the perimeter of my bulbs. In the house I’d want visibility at the base of my water heater, sunk pump and egresses. With all this visibility I’d then establish a console where a complete infrastructure map would clearly reveal all activity that transacts in and around each point of visibility and if any issues were detected I could quickly and easily pin-point the root cause. And with points of control I could then dynamically control and avoid potential danger or damage such as voles eating the bark of my young cherry tree or avoid having my basement flood. Ohhhh wouldn’t this make life so much easier and a lot less costly.

Even though technology has not yet met my household needs, I still have hope. Maybe someday the principles and benefits of solutions like Actional for business transaction assurance will apply not only to the needs of enterprises with business critical transaction but to my needs as well. With Actional enterprises gain complete and automatic end-to-end visibility into their heterogeneous environment. Visibility that helps organizations understand the value of each transaction with the ability to dynamically control and optimize outcome. If enterprises can gain this level of business transaction management, I think it only makes sense that our next market should be the household management sector!

Reduce Order Fallout and Improve Your Customers' Experience

A New Video / Flash Presentation

Our audio presentation, Lost in Transactions – A Day in the Life of Application Failure, presents the fictitious story of one company struggling to find the root cause of application performance problems. If your enterprise identifies with their pain, take the next step by learning more about business transaction assurance with Actional.

Visit our website to view the Flash, or visit the Progress Software YouTube channel to watch the video.

Enjoy!

[Note: The voice of Karen is me, and the voice of Chuck is our own David Bressler.]

New Videos - Savvion Acquisition Part I & II featuring Dr. Bates and Dr. Ketabchi

> Link to Progress Software's YouTube channel

Listen in as Dr. Bates, CTO of Progress Software, and Dr. Ketabchi, founder and CEO of Savvion, discuss the recent acquisition, and Progress Software’s entry into the business process management (BPM) marketplace. Savvion's BPM suite is a perfect fit with our enterprise BEP and BTA solutions.

Adding Leading BPM (Business Process Management) Solution to Our Portfolio

Our integrated infrastructure (or SOA infrastructure) portfolio just got broader and better! On Monday Progress Software announced the acquisition of Savvion, Inc.  Savvion offers a comprehensive, standards-based BPM suite that helps more than 300 of the world’s top-performing companies – including 24 of the ‘Fortune 100’ – automate and continuously improve critical business processes. Dr. John Bates, Progress Software’s CTO and Head of Corporate Development, says, “The Savvion BPM suite is a perfect fit for Progress because it offers leading capabilities for business process modeling and execution. The suite also uniquely includes other integrated key capabilities, including business rules management, document management, an event engine and an analytics engine.”

Progress Software made the announcement during our Global Field Operations Conference in Orlando, FL, which is being held this week. Those lucky enough to attend were able to hear David Bressler deliver a great sales pitch that really communicated the benefit of having the industries best-in-class BPM technology in our briefcase. The combination of our Business Event Processing (BEP), Business Transaction Assurance (BTA) and Integration portfolio, coupled with Savvion's BPM suite, will enable enterprises to achieve the highest levels of operational responsiveness.

To learn more about this announcement, visit our Apama Event Processing blog and read two posts by Dr. John Bates:

• Why businesses must evolve their business processes to be highly responsive, dynamic and predictive – or they will cease to be competitive
  
  
• 10 Reasons Why Progress Chose Savvion

Welcome Savvion to the Progress family, and stay tuned for more details.

Now That's a Real Forklift Upgrade

I have to admit... I don’t really know how our customers use OpenEdge. I do know there are a ton of customers - over 65,000. And, if that weren’t enough, there are over 1,500 partners too. What's more, many of them are in-production with SaaS offerings.

Damn, that’s a lot.

(If any analysts are reading... just think about the opportunity of selling Actional into that installed base even if we never got another “new logo” sale.)

This week’s press release follows on from several months of a beta period where about 20 or 30 OpenEdge customers tested the newly released Actional integration.

As TVH Forklift Parts realized, knowing what’s happening in their integrated infrastructure, and being able to assure a consistent level of service has tremendous value to a distributed and shared infrastructure.

Why is this important?

It’s about the business context. Without that context, solutions are just technology (we have good technology too… but that’s not enough).

That’s the difference between assurance and management. Assurance implies business-technology coordination to achieve a business result. Management implies your technical components are up and running. Big whoop. Just today I spent 2 hours on the phone with T-Mobile. All the technical components were up, but it still wasn’t working. I know you can relate.

Colleen points out that our partners are being viewed more and more as business partners, not just technology providers. Simply put, our partners need technology to understand the business impact of “events” within their infrastructure.

Understanding the business impact means that we (technology infrastructure providers) need to provide an awareness of the business context when problems occur. The only way to do that is to track business context all the time.

I’ve heard a few times recently of prospects who have a “competitive” solution in place to track business assurance… but when I probe, it seems they don’t run it all the time because (pick one):

1. It impacts performance of my applications. (it doesn’t scale)
2. It collects too much information. (it doesn’t scale)
3. It requires too much CPU on my app servers. (it doesn’t scale)

I don’t understand how people think a solution that doesn’t run all the time can do the job.

Let me rephrase.

If it’s not running all the time and collecting context of your business, how are you using the context of the business to make better run-time decisions?

Simply put, you’re not.

I’m glad to welcome TVH Forklift Parts to the Actional family. And, if you’re reading, thanks for sharing your story.

Holy Cloud! Thousands of Customers & Hundreds of Partners

At parties, I do everything I can to avoid talking about work. But, when forced, people eventually ask where I work. When I tell them Progress Software, it's usually followed by "No, we're actually a big public company that does more than databases."

I bet you didn't know we had thousands of SaaS customers in production using our products... Well we do!

And, by the way, it makes a great opportunity for each of those to use Actional for both cloud governance and inter-mediation for customer-specific policy and really flexible standards-based application layer security. If we never sold a new logo, we could still grow like weeds. Our tiny competitors are struggling to survive the recession after raising tons of money their investors will never see again, and we're in a position to thrive by delighting our existing customer base. Awesome.

And not only do we have thousands of customers, we have hundreds of partners adding vertical value to our software solutions.

That partner thing. It's big here.

Why does it work so well for us? Well, that's a huge thanks to the culture of collaboration here at Progress. Actually, it's more than that. It's like an open source attitude towards collaboration (even when we're creating commercial products). We listen, we adapt, and we learn.

We're a day away from the end of our fiscal year, and things are really crazy as you'd expect as we close our year end business. This has been a real transitional year for Progress and another successful year for Actional:

1. We've absorbed IONA and Mindreef, and rolled out new products around integrating those technologies with Actional.
2. We've received top recognition from Gartner and Forrester analysts, and Forrester even delivered a few use cases demonstrating hard ROI numbers around Actional deployments at our production customers in finance and telco.
3. We've delivered another major release update, demonstrating Actional's capabilities well beyond traditional web-services based SOA by integrating Progress OpenEdge, SAP ABAP, IONA Orbix IIOP, Spring, and Microsoft BizTalk orchestration support.
4. We've weathered a very bad economy, and we're quite well positioned for a very strong 2010 with our top-selling Business Transaction Assurance offering.

British Airways Selects Progress SOA to Upgrade the Travel Experience

British Airways announced yesterday that they had selected Progress Software for a revolutionary project that is integrating more than 600 different electronic systems and processes which are involved in getting BA passengers in the air.  This new highly automated infrastructure will bring increased agility to the airline. Rollouts will be easier, and associated cost and time will be reduced.

As is often the case with these kinds of announcements, however, it wasn’t really news to an “insider” like me.  I had visited BA earlier in the year and met with numerous people in the organization from the CTO to Architects and Developers on a number of the projects where they are implementing our technologies.  The thing that was most gratifying to me in those meetings wasn’t the scope of this cutting edge project or even that they were implementing using nearly our entire portfolio of SOA infrastructure products, namely Progress® Sonic® ESB, Progress® Actional® for SOA Management and Progress® DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (SI).  It was that, at every level in the organization, they expressed how pleased they were in the selection of Progress.  

At the senior executive level, they were discussing the partnership that they had developed with Progress and the vision we had provided to address real business challenges, for example, improving customer service by extending the features of BA’s e-commerce website into airports.  At the architecture level, there was a great sense of partnership on how the products we provided could be brought together in a coherent SOA based approach to their infrastructure that increases agility and operational responsiveness.  The developers were just happy that it really was “best of breed” technology that “just works”.  

At a time when most airlines are cutting back, it’s great to see British Airways taking advantage of what SOA has to offer and at every level of the organization they can count on Progress as a trusted partner to help.

Worried About Business Transaction Failure?

Besides costing you money, each failed transaction diminishes customer experience, and can even push your customers to competitors. We just released an Infographic that shows how Progress® Actional’s patented architecture and other key differentiators work to preserve the health of all transactions. It will allow you to see exactly what makes Actional unique, and how transactions are automatically discovered and tracked in a typical process flow. 

With improved business transaction management, you will:

• Enable centralized management and distributed policy enforcement for a cost-effective solution;
• Achieve real time exception management to diagnose and repair transaction problems quickly;
• Get the ability to optimize and create quality services before they are deployed.

WANT TO LEARN MORE? Download the PDF our Business Transaction Assurance Infographic. You can also register to get our E-kit which includes insightful papers and an E-book that will help you ensure that your web services never fail.

CORBA is now Actional-ized!

This is really cool, and I can finally speak about it. Wow, gag orders just don't work very well for me. I mean, I can keep a secret, it's just that the really juicy ones are harder to keep than the others! And, this one's juicy. Ready...

Today we will release Orbix 6.3.4 with support for Actional.

Whoa! I bet at this point a lot of you are like SOA What? (yeah, remember that blog-ism we did here back when SOA was cool?)

Well, let me give you end-to-end visibility into the import of that sentence above.

As with all the other technologies we cover, including the recently announced SAP ABAP integration, Actional integration with Orbix gives customers:

1. End-to-end message flow visibility across an entire CORBA environment, in run-time, without any impact on performance or scalability. That same visibility extends beyond CORBA, and does so consistently to provide a unified view of message flows and business transactions in their environment.
2. The ability to centralize run-time policy creation, allow for distributed enforcement across multiple environments, and to ensure compliance with corporate and regulatory policies across the entire messaging infrastructure.
3. The same tools our current customers have that help them achieve an 80% reduction in time to resolving critical production incidents and a 20% reduction in major production incidents per year by simplifying root-cause analysis and problem resolution.

Now, you might think with all these great benefits, there would be a high cost. Nuh uh!!!

• No additional coding changes to get this up and running. Instrumentation of all CORBA services is automatic.
• No architecture changes, Actional won't impact scalability.
• No extra capacity required, Actional won't impact performance.
• No additional staff are required, dependencies are dynamically discovered and maintained to help keep the cost of ownership low. In fact, case studies independently verified by Forrester Research of our customers who are in production showed a rather quick payback of the investment due, in part, to the low cost of ownership.

Of course, if you follow Actional and Progress at all, awesome technology is old news. Actional has been working on non-SOA distributed applications since early in the development of our product and anytime we add a new technology, protocol, or platform, we've always added the same rich features, while maintaining the enterprise-class performance. Let me say that again, because I've accidentally brought up a very important point.

The single Actional Agent adds all of the functionality, across all of the protocols and platforms, and provides the same outstanding performance you've come to expect from us. In contrast, many other vendors can support all the platforms/protocols, and all the business-transaction-management features, and do so non-intrusively... but THEY CAN'T DO IT ALL AT THE SAME TIME!

Back on track, sorry for the diversion. I'm almost done here, I promise.

There are other equally interesting implications from this release that I'd like to share (in no particular order).

1. This helps to, in part, validate the strategy that lead us to acquire IONA in the first place. There are a lot of cross-product synergies.
2. This continues to prove the applicability of our technology far beyond the common understanding of SOA infrastructure (SOA and HTTP/JMS). We have successfully broken out of the "SOA management" niche, and are providing real value to customers across the entire breadth of business transaction management needs.
3. In this "recovering" economy, Progress can help customers gain more value from their legacy technology investments by upgrading the capabilities in mission critical platforms like Orbix/CORBA. Whether it's from the operational perspective of lowering their operating costs while providing higher-levels of service, or from the business perspective of preventing "revenue leakage", Actional solves real-world problems without impacting the architecture or requiring coding changes to existing applications.

In closing, I wish I could share some of the early adopter customer quotes here. I can't, but the feedback from the (former) IONA field was equally funny. The IONA field is (relatively) new to Progress and hasn't necessarily developed the instant-automatic love for each-and-every Progress product because we all share a logo color scheme. We actually had to prove ourselves to these guys and gals (a very capable team I might add). Once the engineering team was finished, they took the early software and implemented it at some rather large (and equally skeptical) customers. After running it through it's paces, people were actually smiling. When was the last time you saw beta users smiling at performance results? To quote one guy working at a large airline... "it simply worked the way it should."

Beat that!