SOA best practices are necessary for IT organizations to maintain the high standards in SOA reliability, cost-effective operations, and customer service necessary to address competitive pressures and internal and external users' needs. As a result, many IT groups responsible for an SOA are turning to IT best practices, such as those specified by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). These include, for example, the need for operations and applications groups to provide service-level management and meet specific service level targets—from response time targets for interactive systems to the time it takes to diagnose and resolve problems.

SOA and Web services management planning is critical for ensuring these IT initiatives deliver their full business value. SOA and Web services bring new technologies and new dependencies that can be quite challenging to manage. Thus, SOA management solutions form an important part of a strategic SOA platform. In this Webinar, Forrester analyst Randy Heffner reviews the key SOA management capabilities that are required for a successful SOA, including SOA security and SOA governance as well as who needs them and when. Actional vice president Dan Foody discusses how Progress Actional SOA and Web service management products meet these requirements and provides a demo of the power of Actional's end-to-end SOA monitoring, the precondition for reliable SOA and Web services operations.

If your business has substantial security or regulatory compliance requirements, chances are you have concerns about enforcing appropriate measures, while keeping overhead and costs to a minimum. Ensuring security and compliance won't bring in additional revenue, but failure to enforce such measures can result in substantial risk and cost. Join Progress Actional and Partners HealthCare for this webinar and learn how a decoupled approach to service development and centralized security management can help you manage the risk across your enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

What is SOA governance? Find out how it relates to policy-setting and compliance in your Web services environment – and how it is essential to the functioning of your network from development through deployment and test – and especially during runtime. Read the SOA Governance Tutorial today.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is not easy to do right: IT teams must overcome technical, organizational, political and other hurdles on the path to SOA nirvana. Actional and key partners share their real-world experience to help you craft a successful SOA Pilot to avoid the most common pains associated with implementing SOA for the first time.

Find out how Actional breaks down the silos that separate business functions – and knocks down barriers that have hitherto hidden business processes from the underlying IT systems upon which transactions execute. Business Process Visibility from Actional finally makes it possible to align IT goals with those of the business.

Discover how – from design time to runtime – Actional achieves comprehensive SOA governance throught the entire SOA lifecycle This webinar offers an understanding of Actional Web services management, and the Systinet registry, combined with a valuable perspective on the inter-relationships between the various components of a SOA – and how those elements impact each other in the event of change.

Discover how – from design time to runtime – Actional achieves comprehensive SOA runtime governance. This webinar offers an understanding of Actional Web services management, and the Systinet registry, combined with a valuable perspective on the inter-relationships between the various components of a SOA – and how those elements impact each other in the event of change.

While core Web services standards successfully address the mechanics of allowing applications to talk to one another, a successful SOA implementation requires addressing the challenges that lie beyond the pure mechanics of communication -- zeroing in, in addition, on SOA infrastructure. Now, especially, global organizations are implementing enterprise SOA – and are demanding tools and assistance to meet the challenges offered up by this class of applications. This white paper discusses the world-class SOA governance solutions Actional offers to meet these needs and the underlying SOA infrastructure.

By consolidating and reusing common services, service-oriented architectures (SOA) offer many benefits to today's organizations. This introduction to SOA will guide those pursuing SOA towards proven best practices to increase the likelihood of garnering the benefits of an SOA, faster and easier. The white paper will then present Actional's best practices for selecting and implementing a successful SOA pilot and then how to utilize the experience and lessons learned to migrate to an enterprise-class SOA.

With SOA now in production within many organizations, system architects are realizing that the most critical control & SOA governance issue is in runtime. Data point after data point has demonstrated that many SOA implementations are just not working in production as designed or expected. Problems range from service interruptions to entire business processes failing, to compliance risks that generate costly delays and lengthy triage cycles. As these problems continue to pile up, runtime governance is now taking center stage for companies launching and utilizing SOAs. This SOA primer discusses how to get the runtime governance you need.

SOA Worst Practices, Volume II: A Look at SOA governance, as the title suggests, is the follow-on white paper to SOA Worst Practices, Volume I: a collection, of dubious––and sometimes disastrous ––case studies of service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations. Each scenario describes and analyzes the critical SOA errors and lessons learned, and then a prescription is revealed to stimulate discussion and corrective possibilities.

To keep an SOA up and running smoothly and meet service-level agreements (SLAs), IT organizations must be able to monitor service interactions, understand dependencies, and quickly pinpoint the root causes of performance bottlenecks or failures. Learn how Progress Actional for SOA Operations can provide the key capabilities to reduce the risk of deployment. Register to download this free white paper.

Find out why runtime has become the focus of Web services management and SOA governance (vs. design time, development, staging and deployment). Learn how to simplify your life as you initiate your SOA; hint: start out by incrementally deploying Web services. Learn how to extract ROI from your SOA - maximizing it all the way. Examine these free SOA white papers from Actional - use cases, best practices and "worst practices" - and learn from our collective experience.