"Managing IT assets is easier said than done," said David Bressler, Actional Product & Community Evangelist, Progress Software. "Business-critical applications span a complex IT environment and are not always under the control of the application owner. The need for continuous availability of these applications creates challenges in production that only a comprehensive management tool can address. This guide should be used as a point of reference for assessing and evaluating vendors and developing a comprehensive request for proposal for selecting the appropriate tools and infrastructure to successfully build a component-based infrastructure for delivering mission-critical applications."

According to "Finding the Right Software for Managing Your Distributed Business-critical Applications," to meet the evaluation criteria that will address the high performance and critical application availability needed today, an application management infrastructure must:

-- Be easy to implement - beyond an easy implementation, the solution should not require any application level architecture changes and it should not be necessary to configure the solution on a service-by-service basis

-- Offer a shallow learning curve to help realize benefits quickly - to achieve this, the solution should provide a visual interface to represent the distributed application and enable very specific information about dependencies and performance to be exported into executive dashboards.

-- Have a low cost of ownership - this must be applied to features as well as an initial purchase. For example, application changes should be reflected automatically in the management system to avoid time-consuming and costly admin work.

-- Support a mission critical environment with the right scalability, performance and survivability - test the solution to ensure the architecture is consistent on performance whether there is one service or one thousand. To rate "survivability" find out if a management failure will impact an application or the server.

-- Provide robust and meaningful policy capabilities - flexibility and the ability to optimize policies are key to successful application management solutions. Make sure the consumer experience is protected by being able to enforce a policy at the customer access point only.

For further details on finding the right software for managing services-based applications, download "Finding the Right Software for Managing Your Distributed Business-critical Applications" at:http://tinyurl.com/5cp3nn.

Progress Actional SOA management solutions enable organizations to align SOA behaviour with business goals by providing business insight into SOA operations for making and prioritizing decisions and integrated runtime controls for continuously optimizing business outcomes. For more information on these benefits and additional capabilities of Actional 7.1, please visit http://www.Actional.com/products/release-highlights.