AmberPoint announced innovations for analyzing and managing business transactions end to end across distributed applications, services and infrastructure. AmberPoint has extended the reach of its SOA runtime governance software to encompass the transactions flowing across complex heterogeneous systems. These enhanced capabilities from AmberPoint enable organizations to elevate the business value of their SOA-based applications.

“SOA has proven to be a great catalyst for aligning IT with business, yet the deep business value of networked systems is actually associated with the transactions that flow across these composite applications,” said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director for Burton Group. “Yet in many cases, organizations lack any visibility into or capability for tracking and remediating problems with business transactions because these transactions usually span very diverse services, packaged applications, process engines, databases and legacy components. Organizations focused on only services may be missing the forest for the trees.”

While SOA systems have long promised the benefits of greater agility and reduced costs, the utility of these loosely coupled systems rests on their ability to reliably execute transactions across distributed, disparate application components. However, organizations did not previously have an overall view into the status of such transactions. With business transactions, every IT failure becomes a business failure—loss of customers, revenue and brand equity. Yet pinpointing the cause of such failures can require labor-intensive fire drills and usually leads to acrimonious finger-pointing across departments and teams.

AmberPoint Business Transaction Management
AmberPoint runtime SOA governance software tracks each transaction across all SOA infrastructure. AmberPoint’s “message fingerprinting” approach does not involve modifying the messages or message headers, which can break dependent applications in the system. As a result, AmberPoint’s non-invasive instrumentation enables transactions to flow unhindered across the system.

AmberPoint is also able to include visibility into packaged applications—such as customer relationship management (CRM) suites, order management systems and billing systems—that are part of composite SOA systems. AmberPoint achieves this visibility without modifying application source code.

AmberPoint brings real-time control to orchestrated transactions. With AmberPoint, organizations can establish service level agreements for end-to-end transactions and then manage their systems to meet those goals. As the transactions progress, AmberPoint automatically assembles message trails associated with each transaction instance. This enables organizations to identify and resolve transaction errors, failures and bottlenecks quickly. And they can take action to prevent problems—such as throttling transactions by user segment before agreement violations occur.

Benefits:

Business Managers benefit from:

• Real-time insight into the status of all their business transactions
• Improved customer satisfaction from significantly fewer lost or failed transactions

Operations Managers benefit from:

• Lower mean time to repair for errors or performance issues
• Reduced maintenance overhead by IT

IT Architects and Development benefit from:

• Clearer communication with the rest of the organization about the business value flowing through SOA initiatives
• Detailed insight into “hot spots” within SOA systems
• Greater understanding of system dependencies that affect critical business processes and customers

Capabilities:

• Real-time Transaction Tracking
• Managing Quality of Service
• Diagnosis and Root-Cause Analysis
• Transaction Monitoring for Business
• Across Applications & Infrastructure
• Non-Invasive
• Transaction Validation

”We’re seeing customers moving beyond the initial cost-savings benefits of implementing SOA and now looking to raise the business value of these systems,” said Paul Butterworth, chief technology officer at AmberPoint. “Transaction management plays a key role in not only facilitating a better understanding of the business flowing across these systems, but also enabling significant improvements in customer retention. Since you can never be sure which transaction failure will lead to a customer going elsewhere, you need to proactively manage each and every transaction.”