News Desk
AmberPoint Launches Business Transaction Management Capabilities for SOA
Improves the Business Value of SOA Applications by Reducing Business Transaction Errors and Fallout
Jun. 17, 2008 10:45 AM
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.”
About SOA World Magazine News DeskSOA World Magazine News Desk (formerly Web Services Journal) trawls the world of distributed computing and SOA-related developments for the latest word on technologies, standards, products, and services and brings key information to you in a timely and convenient summary form.