Integrated Infrastructure Blog

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.]

SOA? What do you call it?

Some of you may have noticed that we renamed our blog from SOA Infrastructure to Integrated Infrastructure. This came about when our product marketing team wanted to create a new “Open Integration” blog – same authors, same topics. Admittedly, I wasn’t a proponent of it because I wanted more blogging activity here, and I wanted to leverage the audience (and SEO truth be told) that we've built up over the past two years. So, I recommended that we re-brand it and we did.

I have no doubt that one of the reasons we wanted to move away from SOA was due to last January’s post by Ann Thomas Manes, SOA Is Dead; Long Live Services. Lots of SOA evangelists commented about the post, including our VP of Products Dan Foody who agreed with Anne’s perspective. Me? I personally think that SOA in itself is just a marketing term for a number of fairly distinct things, including enterprise integration.

With that said, this wouldn’t be a post by me if I didn’t offer or promote something, so I’m going to let you fill in the blanks.

Our new white paper The Foundation of _________ Quality is now available! What does _________ quality really mean? This white paper not only answers that question but it also examines the many facets of _________ quality. Read it and learn how you can ensure that your _________ initiative, such as Web 2.0, cloud computing, and BPM, can deliver the visibility and operational responsiveness that your enterprise demands. Get the white paper.

If you’d like to learn more about how your enterprise can achieve operational responsiveness, visit the Progress Software website.

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.

A BEP On Our Radar...

Last year Progress Software started talking a lot about Business Event Processing (BEP)—more commonly known as complex event processing (CEP). It really kicked into gear when we commissioned an independent technology market research company, Vanson Bourne, to conduct a survey and report on their results. Vanson Bourne interviewed 400 companies representing energy generation, telecommunications,and logistics sectors in the US and Western Europe. Why these industries? Well, because of the volume and complexity of their "business events" (service delivery) - both through systems and processes, and customer, partner, and supplier interactions. The results of the survey, detailed in the paper Overtaken by Events? - The Quest for Operational Responsiveness, demonstrates that harnessing business events, smart interpretation, and fast response are clear objectives for these industries. And the need is immediate.

Below I've included the Executive Summary of Key Findings. If you'd like to get more detail on their findings, visit our website and download the complete paper. 

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF KEY FINDINGS

The Objective Is Operational Responsiveness

Operational responsiveness is the ability of business processes and systems to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur, enabling business leaders to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. The survey identified a number of key pointers as to why businesses would be keener than ever to improve how they respond operationally, for example:

Customers

• 91% said they are trying to act in a more personal “one-to-one” way with the customer. That means paying more attention to specific, individual feedback.
• 74% reported that areas such as digital market channels, mobile platforms, and social channels have caused a significant increase in the flow of information into and through their business. That means paying more attention to events in the context of a blizzard of communication.

Competition

• 70% of the businesses surveyed said that it would it be an advantage to be able to price their products based upon dynamic factors, in response to intra-day changes, such as changes in competitor prices/activity.

Process efficiency

• Operational incidents can be costly: 82% of companies surveyed have to continuously monitor processes to try to prevent them happening.
• 72% said their business processes take too long, and they need to shorten them.

Businesses want to respond quickly and more accurately to business events at the operational and business planning level. Real-time information delivery is seen as an important contributor, seen as having a role in three key areas:

• Monitoring KPIs—overseeing pre-ordained service or business performance benchmarks.
• Automatically alerting end users when certain conditions occur—flagging exceptional circumstances or activity for colleagues to take action.
• Automating response processes—delegating conditional processes to the operational systems

Of the companies surveyed 82% are planning investments in real-time technology by mid-2010 in the hope of achieving the vision.

But the Road Is Long...

The survey reveals that most companies still have a long journey on the path to operational responsiveness as defined above. Here are a few stand-out numbers that underline the current situation:

Service delivery and process gaps

• 67% hear about problems in service from customers before they have identified those problems themselves.
• Only 8% report currently business information in real-time: indeed only 19% report on an intra- day basis.
• 72% think that their business processes take too long and they need to shorten them.
• 89% cannot get a single view of process performance because information on business processes is held in multiple different operational systems. 80% use middleware to try to bring data together but not to the satisfaction of those in charge of operations.

Business planning gaps

• 34% say that, by the time they are able to see a change or trend in one of their business processes, they have missed some if not all of the opportunity to react to it.
• 47% of companies surveyed report that business information is typically analyzed to identify patterns and trends historically and not in real time.
• 58% admit that they have significant gaps in the information they need to support their business decision making.

Real-time Information and Business Event Processing (BEP)

In fact, 94% of businesses said that real-time information is important to them, and 78% said immediacy of response to business events provides a competitive advantage. But where business information is incomplete and/or sits across a range of disparate, non-compatible operational systems (as is admitted by most of the companies surveyed here), then speed alone is not enough. Where BEP is being tried out, users are already witnessing the power of combining and correlating across platforms, as well as the desired advantages that real-time systems would provide:

BEP benefits experienced so far

• Filter and analyze lots of events quickly—66%
• Take automatic actions in response to certain sequences of events occurring—55%
• Better monitoring of existing operational systems—50%
• Normalizing and correlating events from multiple different sources—45%
• Providing real-time visibility into information for business end-users—42%
• Spotting time-sensitive event patterns—25%

If you'd like to get more detail on their findings, visit our website and download the complete paper.

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.

Meet Progress Software On The Road Next Week

Before we jump into the swing of holiday shopping, celebrations and announcing year end numbers, we're hitting the road. If you are attending Gartner AADI in Las Vegas or Management World Americas in Orlando, make sure to take time visit us. Here's where Progress Software will be:

7 - 9 December 2009
Las Vegas, NV
Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit
This is the year's MUST ATTEND conference on Cloud Computing, SOA and Applications. Regardless of your challenge, you'll find answers that fit your needs in today's changed environment. And the best part... Progress Software is going to be there, at Booth #3. As a platinum sponsor, we'll be speaking about how our customer, Sallie Mae, used event-driven architecture to transform their IT department into a strategic partner for its business.

> Learn more!

8 - 10 December 2009
Orlando, FL
Management World Americas
In addition to visiting us at Management World Americas in Booth #112 during exhibition hours, you can see how DataXtend SI and Apama are being used in three TM Forum Catalyst projects. As part of the show's Forumville event, they are featuring five Themed Zones that focus on key areas for customers, services and networks – all driving towards optimizing business performance. See our products in action!

> Reserve your FREE book!

HOPE TO SEE YOU!

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.

SOA Upgrade to British Airways

British Airways (BA) is turning to service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Progress Software to connect over 600 different electronic systems and processes involved in getting BA passengers in the air.

BA has more than 250 key applications distributed over 300 locations around the globe, which explains why they chose Progress. From an integration perspective, Progress® Sonic ESB® excels in those scenarios that require the integration and management of hundreds or even thousands of systems. One Progress customer was able to deploy its integration backbone out to 25 locations a day (and can update them in a fraction of that time).

One can only guess how many of those 250 systems are touched when you travel BA. Everything from choosing your seat assignment to charging your credit card (once only please), to selecting a vegan meal is managed via systems. And let's hope those systems succeed in keeping track of your luggage.

The real-time data synchronization of Progress® DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (SI) allows BA to significantly improves information quality while reducing costs associated with data replication. And Progress® Actional® SOA Management provides BA with the visibility they need to make sure your reservation gets booked and you make it to your destination in a timely manner. Weather permitting, of course. ;)

Thanks to SOA, BA is able to extend the features of its e-commerce site right through to its airports, allowing greater self-service functionality and 'plug and play' capability to over 25,000 users.

"Moving this to a highly automated environment is a challenge, but SOA quickly proved itself to be the right approach to achieving our goal of a fully agile environment."

So the next time you take your family to London (or Disney - that's my family's destination of choice at the moment), think about how many transactions went right along the way, automatically.

I love when technology makes a tangible difference. Pretty cool stuff.

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!

Recap: Gartner EA Summit in Orlando

This guest post comes courtesy of Larry Fulton. Larry is an independent consultant who spent 14 years as a solutions and enterprise architect at UPS and 3 years consulting on, among other things, strategic integration infrastructure issues and enterprise service bus (ESB) technology as a senior analyst at Forrester  research.

The enterprise architecture community is always surprising to me for its enthusiastic optimism - remember that this is a field where the majority of us spend a lot of our time explaining what we do and why it is valuable, often to our own management. Attendees were very clearly engaged in the session topics, there were plenty of insightful questions, and the attendees I spoke with personally saw a lot of value in the material presented. The focus was on the practice of EA rather than specific technical aspects of modern enterprise architecture, which of course begs the question what EAs are doing to stay on top of the technology landscape.

Gartner sees the influence of EA growing over time, especially in those organizations where EA is successfully involving itself in the business and its processes. Aside from the expected pro-EA and how-to-improve-credibility messages, I heard a number of new and refreshing perspectives on EA and its future:

Gartner's Anne Lapkin confronted the "Is EA an art or a science?" dilemma head-on, and clearly stated that many aspects of EA are in fact an art. She was referring specifically to the real work of fitting and re-fitting EA's mission to the current and evolving needs of real businesses. There may be a lot of well-defined process around the tools of the trade - modeling various aspects of current and future architecture, establishing effective governance processes, and so forth - but it takes real insight based on experience to assess what EA can and should be doing to help the business succeed, and to know when that needs to change as the business itself evolves. This is an area where many experts, have been reluctant to come right out and say, "Look, you need to have the right leaders, and you can't necessarily just pick someone who is skilled in another area and expect to train them to this level of EA perspective". Another way to say this is that skilled solutions architects need to be part of EA's activities, but solutions architects don't necessarily have the perspective to define the EA agenda.

Betsy Burton's sessions illuminated the reality that enterprise architects often must fill the role of counselors - working with disparate teams with different perspectives to find common ground and move forward. On the broader business front, this same theme emerged in her recommendation that enterprise business architectures need to include a model of how people actually work together in an organization.

She also mentioned that EAs need to spend at least five per cent of their time playing so they can remain aware of current technologies. My own opinion is that this is not enough - unless you can commit at least half a day each week to some kind of research, which is to say at least ten per cent of your time, it is very difficult to stay on top of important developments.

I particularly enjoyed Bruce Robertson's session on "architecting for emergence". He talked about "EA light", or ways that EA groups should focus on what matters the most and promote application team innovation elsewhere. The idea of establishing policy and technology "guard rails" that essentially say you can do what you like as long as you conform to these particular things and as long as you don't do these other things is not new. But, looking at an organization in a methodical way to identify exactly those rules that really matter and promoting choice elsewhere is where many EA groups need to be headed. Certainly his advice to EA groups to understand local influences and priorities and their relationship to enterprise influences and priorities is a good idea for any EA group, and especially those operating in large organizations.

One of the keynote speakers, Mark Rashino, represented in my opinion the central message to EAs - IT needs to ask itself, "What new strategic capabilities can I offer?" When CIO's are asking themselves that question but don't have an answer, where will they turn? EA needs to be ready to answer that question, whenever it is asked.