The Actional Business Transaction Management platform, which allows users to detect and resolve problems between applications and their interactions, now provides visibility into all applications built using SAP NetWeaver.

Prior to the availability of this release, only JavaTM-based NetWeaver customers enjoyed full access to the powerful visibility capabilities of the Actional 8.1 Business Transaction Management platform. Actional 8.1 products offer SAP customers unprecedented insight into and between ABAP-based applications and their interactions within heterogeneous environments. When issues occur either outside or within these applications directly impacting a transaction's success, the IT department can quickly target and address the problem before it becomes critical or even negatively impacts the SAP application or the enterprise as a whole.

Dan Foody, vice president of Actional Products, Progress Software, said: "The launch of the Actional 8.1 Business Transaction Management platform expands the capabilities we can offer for SAP customers and improves the visibility into ABAP-based applications. Actional 8.1 products now offer SAP Application users uncompromised business transaction assurance and visibility across distributed, disparate architectures. It is important to note that other business transaction management offerings in the market only provide black-box visibility of the NetWeaver environment, while Actional 8.1 product includes visibility, tight policy monitoring, and intuitive alerting even of activity within the ABAP environment. Users can expect a greater ROI when managing their SAP applications with Actional product because they will experience less transaction failures and an increase in application performance."

Other highlights of Actional 8.1 Business Transaction Management platform:

• Auditing and logging using messaging infrastructure: Actional product extends auditing and logginnd logging capability, which now provides customers with the choice of distributing audit and log information via JMS, or sending it directly to a database - offering customers the choice between flexibility, reliability, and performance. This capability also acts as a foundation for event driven architectures, allowing event consumers to easily gain access to the rich set of events occurring within business applications.
• Increased visibility: Actional platform expands visibility functionality levels for the entire enterprise including support for the Spring Framework development platform and the Microsoft Biztalk platform.
• Support for JMS testing: Progress has increased the testing capabilities of Actional 8.1 product by including assets that are built directly on JMS with no underlying SOA architecture. This new feature delivers continued support across heterogeneous environments.

Additionally, Progress worked as a member of the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, a hands-on environment for SAP, its customers and partners to collaboratively innovate, accelerate and showcase new business solutions and technologies. To help customers, SAP and Progress Software recently co-authored and published a report from the SAP Co-Innovation Lab titled "Management and Business Transaction Assurance with SAP and Progress Actional ". This report provides a summary of the integrated SOA management solution developed and validated as part of the lab.