Actional 5.1, released in June, narrowly missed out winning the Gold Award. The platform manages a service-oriented architecture as well as Web services deployed in production. The platform includes Actional's SOAPstation, Active Agents and Looking Glass product, offering a view of an entire enterprise service network enabling administrators to monitor for problems, disseminate policy and service-level agreements.

Actional monitors not only SOA and Web services, but manages relationships between those and other service endpoints like databases, Web pages, middleware and legacy systems.

The Looking Glass server and Console visualize the service network for an admin, simplifying management.

Our judges gave Actional 5.1 the highest marks possible in the functionality and support categories.

Pricing starts at $5,000 per CPU, or $75,000 for the entire management stack, including Looking Glass and Console.

Michael S. Mimoso