Posted by Julianna Cammarano
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!”
Posted by Julianna Cammarano
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 >
Posted by Julianna Cammarano
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!
