AmberPoint today unveiled significant advancements to its industry-leading solution for monitoring and managing business transactions across interconnected enterprise applications. AmberPoint’s next-generation Business Transaction Management (BTM) solution introduces the Business Transaction Safety Net^TM, which includes Active Transaction Recording, the Transaction Search Engine and facilities for extending BTM to custom applications. AmberPoint traces each transaction end-to-end across complex application streams such as claims processing, user provisioning or procurement systems, discovering any transaction failures and quickly isolating the root cause.

“Organizations have got to follow their transactions through increasingly complex application streams or risk costly transaction failures,” explained Frank Kenney, Research Director at Gartner. “The stakes are huge for this issue, with costs reaching tens of millions of dollars a year in terms of lost revenue and time wasted trying to figure out what went wrong – and that’s to say nothing of the longer term cost of losing customers due to poor service.”

AmberPoint Business Transaction Management

Building on the pioneering solution it introduced in 2008, AmberPoint has extended its Business Transaction Management capabilities to address the growing requirements of enterprise applications. AmberPoint utilizes a non-invasive “message fingerprinting” approach to dynamically trace business transactions as they flow through composite applications – in real time.

• Enables organizations to establish service level agreements for transactions and manage their systems to meet those goals
• Real-time alerting for lost, failed, non-compliant and fraudulent transactions
• Can be applied to any variety of application component — not just services, but anything that can process a message

Introducing the Business Transaction Safety Net

AmberPoint has launched a comprehensive set of BTM features and capabilities that significantly reduce the risk and cost of transaction failures across distributed applications. AmberPoint’s Business Transaction Safety Net includes Active Transaction Recording, the Transaction Search Engine and the Transaction Visibility Toolkit. Additionally, AmberPoint announced enhanced platform support for its BTM solution.

“We’ve seen that transaction failures in distributed applications are a huge issue,” said Julie Craig, a Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates. “Yet, uncovering the root cause of these failures can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Log analysis and other exception management solutions often fall short in this area because they require pre-defined criteria to extract any meaningful information. AmberPoint’s Transaction Safety Net solves this business-critical need by providing an automated way to discover and remedy transaction fallout from unforeseen events.”

Benefits

• Minimizes the business costs of lost or failed transactions by discovering transaction issues in real time
• Lowers mean time to repair and significantly speeds root cause analysis by pinpointing where transaction failures occur
• Lowers business risk of distributed applications by enabling Operations staff to capture data on each transaction and to search for these transactions based on fragmented, symptomatic information
• Improves communication and collaboration between Business Operations and IT Operations teams
• Increases customer satisfaction and retention by minimizing the incidence of lost transactions

Active Transaction Recording

Because it has visibility into the business content of messages flowing through the system, AmberPoint can log data that’s critical to Business Operations, such as order numbers, dollar value or customer ID. Its policy-based system logs transaction data by context and content, and enables organizations to tailor their transaction logging to the specific needs of each stakeholder.

• Sanitize sensitive data elements before logging to address privacy and compliance issues
• Customize logging parameters for each transaction type as well as individual services
• Log data to third-party log analysis, business intelligence or archiving systems

Transaction Search Engine

Transaction failures pose a greater issue in composite applications, where it is much more challenging to discover the root cause of the failure. Often, the clues to a failed transaction amount to incomplete symptomatic data, such as “I lost an order placed at about 1:00 PM.” Until now, the only way to track down a failed transaction has been through time-consuming searches through multiple log files. AmberPoint’s Transaction Search Engine makes quick work of this issue by providing a unified transaction searching console that rapidly locates specific transactions based on technical or business data—from such fragmented data as error codes, user account numbers or part numbers.

• Aggregation, assembly and display of transaction messages unified from logs across multiple platforms, applications and intermediaries
• Text search across messages to look for exception symptoms
• Drill down from messages to correlated transactions to understand root cause
• Direct access to symptomatic messages in a transaction to ease collaboration between customer support and IT diagnostics

Transaction Visibility Toolkit

AmberPoint’s Transaction Visibility Toolkit is a platform-neutral protocol and SDK that enables organizations to augment the transaction data AmberPoint collects by extending the reach of AmberPoint’s BTM to one-off applications and infrastructure.

• Extends AmberPoint BTM capabilities to home-grown applications, legacy systems and vertical solutions
• Enables visibility across appliances, middleware, machine-controlled environments and mobile devices
• Available to AmberPoint SI and ISV partners

Enhanced Platform Support

AmberPoint has added support for a broad set of additional platforms, extending the reach of its industry-leading BTM capabilities to include:

• Apache ServiceMix
• JBoss Application Server
• JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform
• Oracle WebLogic Server 10
• SAP NetWeaver clusters
• TIBCO BusinessWorks

In related news, AmberPoint also announced its integration with the IBM DataPower SOA appliance (see "AmberPoint Announces Integration with IBM DataPower").

“These days, the larger enterprise applications are almost always compositions of multiple disparate components,” said Paul Butterworth, AmberPoint’s Chief Technology Officer. “So the issue of tracking and managing transactions is quickly becoming a greater need in the market. We’ve seen our initial Business Transaction Management solution deliver results in many high transaction volume customer settings and based on that experience we’ve gained further insight into how to help our customers succeed. The Business Transaction Safety Net builds on our success, introducing even more powerful capabilities in this area.”

Availability

The Business Transaction Safety Net, related features and capabilities are provided with AmberPoint Management System version 6.5, available in April 2009.

About AmberPoint

AmberPoint provides the world's most widely distributed and implemented solutions for governing and managing composite applications. Utilizing a policy-based approach to manage the health and well-being of services-based systems, AmberPoint enables its enterprise customers to better understand system behavior, manage each transaction flowing across their distributed environments, and implement policies that automate performance management, remedy exceptional conditions and uphold security. For more information, contact AmberPoint at 510.663.6300 or apinfo@amberpoint.com, or visit www.amberpoint.com for a complimentary developer's edition of AmberPoint software.