CORBA is Now Actional-ized!

Orig­i­nally posted over at my Progress blog.

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 so what?

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!