The ITKO Blog: Service Virtualization and Application Lifecycle Optimization - CA Technologies

CA LISA Application Delivery Sessions at CA World '13

We are hard at work getting ready for our second run at CA World 2013 since being aquired. Over the past 18 months we have added many new customers and are excited to have many of them tell their stories to the CA World audience.

Below you will find the Application Delivery Track sessions at CA World '13. This includes Service Virtualization, Agile Cloud Delivery solutions and DevOps-focused content. Each session is described in greater detail by clicking the links to the catalog.  

If you are attending CA World, come join us and learn the latest about CA LISA, and how it is being applied in today's complex IT world. 

Helpful tip:   If you want to import the below information to your calendar/phone, click here to add this schedule to your device.

Mon Apr 22	10:00am	Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience is a Key Catalyst for IT Transformation Mandalay Bay Ballroom KL	Michael Sargent - General Manager, CA Technologies
	11:15am	Focus Area Opening - Innovate Faster with Continuous Delivery and Service Virtualization for DevOps Mandalay Bay Ballroom KL	Shridhar Mittal, CA Technologies
	2:30pm	Qualcomm: Innovating New Features - Virtually Delivering Faster, Without Fail Breakers L	Scott Jackson - SW QA Engineer, Staff, Qualcomm Inc
	2:30pm	Partner Session - Accenture and CA Technologies Drive Service Virtualization Adoption Across the Enterprise Breakers K	John Pickering - Managing Director, Accenture; Michael Weinstein - Manager, Accenture
	3:45pm	Customer Session - Reforming the Approach to Application Development & Quality at Blue Cross Blue Shield Minnesota Breakers L	Jacki Dykhuizen - Software Quality Manager, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota
	3:45pm	Accelerate - Innovate Faster with Application Delivery in Cloud and Virtual Service Environments (CA LISA Release Automation - Nolio software demonstration) Breakers K	Doron Gerstel, Eran Sher, CA Technologies
Tue Apr 23	8:30am	Using and Managing Service Virtualization with Production Data Mining for High­ Performance Applications Breakers L	Chris Kraus - Sr Principal Product Manager, CA Technologies Ken Ahrens, CA Technologies
	8:30am	Customer Session - New Channels for Parallel Delivery and Quality with CA LISA at DIRECTV Breakers K	Robert Kelman - Sr Mgr, ITSD Tools & Architecture, DIRECTV
	10:00am	Continuous Delivery with CA LISA Suite: Accelerating Innovation from Design to Release Breakers L	Ruston Vickers, CA Technologies; Kalyan Kumar (KK) - VP & Chief Technology Architect - HCL Technologies - ISD, HCL TECHNOLOGIES LTD
	11:15am	Service Virtualization - How to Save Money, Simplify the Environment, and Reduce the Impact of Downtime Breakers L	Angela Goff - Manager, IT Applications, Nationwide Insurance
	11:15am	CA LISA in a Cloud, a New Version of Center of Excellence for Testing Breakers K	Robert Linton - VP Appl. Lifecycle Management, CorTechs Inc.; Steve Mazzuca, CA Technologies
	2:30pm	Customer Panel - Best Practices for Agility and Continuous Delivery with Virtual Environments Breakers K	Jacki Dykhuizen - Software Quality Manager, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota; Laura Miller - VP Global Product Development, FirstData
	3:45pm	Customer Session - Sprint Virtualizes Everything, Even Partners and Training Environments Breakers L	Todd Schuster - Applications Developer III, Sprint
	3:45pm	Lab: CA LISA Hands­On Introduction Session Surf AB	Chris Kraus - Sr. Product Manager, CA Technologies
	3:45pm	Enterprise Cloud - No More Excuses Breakers K	Eli Almog - CTO - CSC Cloud, CSC
	5:00pm	Invite only	Meet CA LISA Advisors and References
Wed Apr 24	8:30am	Ensuring User Adoption for CA LISA Breakers K	James Grigolite - Program Director, CA Technologies
	8:30am	Analyst Session - voke - Results Across the Lifecycle with Service Virtualization Research Breakers L	Theresa Lanowitz - Analyst, voke, inc.
	10:00am	Mobile Enterprise Apps: Real World Best Practices to Accelerate Mobile App Development & Delivery Breakers L	Jonathan Lindo - VP, Software Engineering, CA Technologies
	11:15am	CA LISA Pathfinder Introduction - New Frontiers in Dev & Test Automation Breakers L	Min Fang, CA Technologies
	11:15am	Lab: CA LISA Hands­On Introductory Session Surf AB	Chris Kraus - Sr. Solution Architect, CA Technologies

High-Velocity Healthcare Application Webinar - CA LISA and CA APM

We're looking forward to an upcoming webinar featuring some of the most compelling service virtualization customer stories we've encountered in the Healthcare (insurance, medical and government sector) industry.

As the major players and Payers in healthcare move toward new regulations and Federal and state exchanges, the impact on their software development and IT Operations efforts will be huge. How can these two teams within each enterprise work together more closely, and become Agile enough in delivering new functionality to make it through the challenges they will face over the coming year?

Join Harris Corporation's Mark Waterloo, and hear how he's part of a performance and agility transformation using SV and APM together at one of the world's largest health organizations. And stay for frequent CA community contributors Jason English and Ken Ahrens talking about how customers can develop, test and release software faster, and do so with better performance than conventional methods using CA LISA Service Virtualization along with real feedback from leading Application Performance Management suites like CA APM.

Webinar: High-Velocity Healthcare Application Delivery with Service Virtualization and APM

Run Time: Thursday, Feb. 28. 1:00PM - 2:00PM Eastern

Free sign up: http://servicevirtualization.com/events/ca-healthcare-webinar-high-velocity-with-ca-lisa-and-ca-apm

Bring your questions, and join the ServiceVirtualization.com community of IT and business professionals interested in advancing SV practices.

CA LISA 3-Minute Overview Video: Get in the Fast Lane

Check out this new video from CA, describing how enterprise IT can "get in the fast lane" and avoid traffic "constraints" on software development and testing, with the CA LISA(r) suite of products.

  

There are 3 aspects of CA LISA highlighted here that help businesses overcome complexity and constraints, and deliver applications to market faster:

1. Shift Left. Provide virtual environments and data that allow development teams to move testing left in the timeline. Much earlier testing means each phase of development, system test, integration, etc. is completed faster, and with fewer errors escaping into the next phase.

2. Mainframe Virtualization. Since our ITKO days, LISA has always supported service virtualizing backends and heterogeneous environments that include legacy and mainframe systems (CICS, COBOL copybooks, CORBA orbs, IMS, etc.) but now with CA we support more protocols than ever, and draw on the experience of one of the world leaders in managing these systems. Our SV even resolves constraints between developed components inside the mainframe stack.

3. Ease-of-ROI. Making software usability improvements such as one-click workflows, new controls and the like certainly helps end users get productive with CA LISA faster. But much of ROI comes from having Professional Services teams with a proven methodology for helping customers strategically plan, adopt and measure value from their investment.

Anyway, hope you find this new video useful for quickly explaining how CA LISA can get your application development in the fast lane!

Fascinating results from the Service Virtualization Community

I’m reading an early copy of voke’s “Market Snapshot: Service Virtualization” report, which will be available for download along with a webinar tomorrow (December 12, 1:00PM Central) discussing the results here: http://servicevirtualization.com/webinar.

This report encapsulates the results of a global survey of almost 200 IT execs and professionals, much like the studies we’ve sponsored in North America and Europe. That series proved that the challenges of not virtualizing software development environments are substantial and a known quantity. 

What is so interesting about this latest voke survey is that it went out largely to the growing community of Service Virtualization users and devotees who are already familiar with the topic. Many of them are actively considering Service Virtualization solutions over the next 12 months, and more than half are already using a solution like CA LISA to resolve constraints in application development lifecycles.

For a taste of the material, here’s some bad news, and good news from the report:

• Bad News: Did you know that 96% of the audience said they experienced significant wait time for system environments needed for application development? More than half say they could wait 2 days or more for each request!

As customers demand more capabilities from composite applications, the complexity of developing and testing in these enterprise IT environments will only increase. Clearly there is still a great need for relief for system constraints. Whether the needed systems are in the enterprise’s datacenter, or sitting with a development partner, Service Virtualization technology can directly address these dependencies through simulation.

• Good News: Fully 75% of the respondents who are already using Service Virtualization technology said it increased the availability of development and test environments by more than 50%. That’s astounding when you realize just how much idle time exists in most enterprise development shops.

I don’t want to give away all the best parts of the story. Besides providing a succinct introduction to Service Virtualization, the challenges and results illuminated in this latest report really speak for themselves. I hope you’ll join the analyst Theresa Lanowitz, voke and Ruston Vickers, SVP development for CA LISA, on tomorrow’s webinar and get a copy of the document for yourself.

Above: The advertisement for tomorrow's webinar...

Webinar 12/12/12 on Service Virtualization Value Results with voke - Research & Interpretation

There's a lot of really good market research coming out lately on the evolving practice of Service Virtualization (SV), and this one's particularly interesting because it is the first to cover a lot of companies who are either already aware of SV or using a solution. For instance, did you know that a majority of SV users report a 25% or greater reduction in software delivery cycle times?

That's a lot of value when you think about how many dev/test teams (95%) report spending time waiting on environments... Here's your chance to hear about it first.

Let's interpret these new results with voke senior analyst, Theresa Lanowitz. Her team recently surveyed service virtualization users, managers and decision makers on the types of value they are receiving by modifying their application development practices to reduce development cycle time and increase quality, amid ever-increasing challenges of today's complex apps.

Join Theresa and and Ruston Vickers (CA LISA Technology SVP and founder, ITKO) for this killer webinar on 12/12/12, and get your own free copy of the survey results.

Webinar: Service Virtualization Results, Research & Routes with voke and CA

Date:  Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Time: 1:00 - 2:00PM Central US

Registration is free but limited to servicevirtualization.com members.  Visit their community site and join the SV experts (you will be redirected to login or create an account).

Text link: http://servicevirtualization.com/profiles/blogs/the-value-of-service-virtualization-via-voke

 

News - CA Press Releases Newest Title: "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated"

[From the official press release of book publisher CA Press.]

CA Press Releases Newest Title: "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated"

Book Concisely Explains Service Virtualization and Helps IT Professionals Drive Innovation.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (PRWEB) October 01, 2012: Oracle OpenWorld 2012, October 1, 2012 – CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) today announced the release of Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated, the latest book from CA Press, at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 with a *free book signing.

This book is the first definitive guide to the IT and business practice of Service Virtualization (SV). It illustrates how some of the world’s largest organizations can achieve new levels of agility and efficiency with this unique approach to application development and testing.

Written by John Michelsen, CA Technologies Chief Technology Officer and technology inventor, and Jason English, director of CA LISA Product Marketing at CA Technologies, and editor of the ServiceVirtualization.com website; the book details how the powerful new practice of SV captures and simulates today’s complex applications.

The authors provide real-world lessons learned from organizations that have applied SV within large, complex customer IT environments--including project plans, metrics and organizational challenges.

When adopted successfully to remove constraints in the existing software environment, SV can deliver dramatic improvements to an IT organization including increased speed, performance and agility for the development of enterprise application software.

Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated recounts early attempts at simulations, using examples from past customer projects to help readers understand the ins and outs of SV. Insights culled from interviews with IT leaders detail how they overcame struggles with fostering and driving innovation within their enterprises.

“While Service Virtualization changes the playing field for how companies deliver innovation to market, it is not nearly as difficult to adopt as some might expect,” said Michelsen. “When organizations realize how virtual development and test environments are better than real ones, they not only save money and time, but even improve their job satisfaction levels. IT teams are happier and more productive when they are spending more time on valuable, customer-facing innovation.”

Readers will learn:

• Why IT constraints are the enemy of business agility and how to overcome them;
• The myths and capabilities of SV;
• Industry best practices, case studies and results measurement techniques;
• How SV can be rolled out and used for software development and testing in the cloud.

CA Technologies will host an exclusive Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated book signing event with authors Michelsen and English at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco on October 2, 2012. The event will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. PDT in the Tap and Brew Lounge (#101) in Moscone South. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet with authors and receive a copy of this innovative title.

For more information visit:

•     Reality Is Overrated preview chapter(registration required)
•     Reality Is Overrated YouTube videos
•     Twitter: @ITKO or @svcvirt, or follow #svworks

Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated is available on Amazon for $16.49. eBook versions can be purchased from the publisher Apress. For a limited period, an introductory price is also available. Participants in the ServiceVirtualization.com community can also qualify for a free copy of the book by participating in discussions.

*Special conditions for employees from US government bodies applies – details available on request and at the show.

About the Authors

John Michelsen is chief technology officer at CA Technologies, where he has delivered market-leading inventions delivered in database, distributed computing, virtual/cloud management, multi-channel web application portals, Service Virtualization and more. Michelsen is responsible for CA Technologies technical leadership and innovation, further developing the company’s software strategy and relationships to deliver customer value. He joined CA Technologies in 2011 through the acquisition of ITKO, a company he founded.

Jason English is director of CA LISA Product Marketing at CA Technologies. Jason joined CA Technologies through the acquisition of ITKO, where he served in a number of roles including marketing, software UI design and sales support. Jason is currently focused on CA Technologies customer advocacy and sharing SV best practices and resources through the Service Virtualization community.

About CA Technologies

CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) provides IT management solutions that help customers manage and secure complex IT environments to support agile business services. Organizations leverage CA Technologies software and SaaS solutions to accelerate innovation, transform infrastructure and secure data and identities, from the data centre to the cloud. Learn more about CA Technologies at http://www.ca.com.

Follow CA Technologies:

•     Twitter @CAinc
•     Blogs
•     Social Media Page
•     Press Releases

About Apress
With more than 1,000 books in print and e-formats, Apress is the authoritative source for IT professionals, software developers, and business leaders all over the world. Apress provides high-quality, no-fluff content that helps serious technology professionals build a comprehensive pathway to career success. Since 2007, Apress has been part of Springer Science+Business, one of the world's leading scientific, technical, and medical publishing houses, enabling global distribution of Apress publications. For more information, please visit http://www.apress.com.

Legal Notices
Copyright © 2012 CA. All Rights Reserved. One CA Plaza, Islandia, N.Y. 11749. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

CA Press Contact:
Tariq Ahmed
CA Technologies
Tel:     +44 (0)1753 241 069
tariq.ahmed@ca.com

Apress Press Contact:
Christine Condon
Apress
Tel: 212-620-8021
christinecondon@apress.com

Read the official press release from the publisher CA Press here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/10/prweb9957704.htm

 

Join CA GM Shridhar Mittal at Gartner ITxpo Oct. 23

When it comes to high-level IT management and operations discussions, the Gartner Symposium / ITxpo events seem to be the most power-packed. We're looking forward to this year's event in Orlando - news here:

CA Technologies Customers and Executives Share IT Insight at Gartner Symposium - ITxpo 2012 in Orlando

CA leaders will be appearing in at least 5 sessions. Our GM of the SV business unit (and former ITKO CEO) Shridhar Mittal will be delivering a session Tuesday, Oct. 23, 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. ET; WDW Dolphin, Southern IV-V, which will highlight "how we got here" to establish virtual modeling and simulation using virtual service environments as critical differentiators of this generation of enterprise software.

Here's the abstract:

• Driving Innovation with Service Virtualization – Eliminate Software Lifecycle Constraints. Enterprises are breaking the constraints of innovation with Service Virtualization (SV), the practice of simulating the behavior, data and performance characteristics of complex software environments. Using service virtualization, development and test teams are decoupled from infrastructure dependencies and can deliver releases up to 30 to 50 percent faster, with higher quality.

Expect Shridhar's spot to include a special guest appearance from an exec at one of the world's leading companies - solving an architecture and integration challenge so complex, you will have to hear it from the source to believe it!

Best Buy talks Service Virtualization on Innovation Lumniaries

Check out this excellent video case study from our CA Innovation Luminaries channel. Ian Kelly, Director of Integration & SOA at Best Buy, discusses how Service Virtualization practices enable them to innovate and deliver new software development environments far faster.

 

Customer innovation happens fastest when there is an unconstrained environment to support it, and the best results for SV are measured when it is adopted across multiple groups, working in parallel. Thanks to Ian and the CA Luminaries team for sharing this story.

 

CA taking Service Virtualization Book to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

Big event coming up in San Francisco - join us there! This is your best chance to get a signed copy of the new book the day it comes out ... and perhaps a refreshment.

Here's the media release from CA:

CA Technologies to Showcase Service Virtualization Portfolio and Unveil ’Reality Is Overrated’ Book at Oracle OpenWorld

CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) today announced that it will showcase its Service Virtualization solutions at Oracle Open World 2012 September 3- - October 4, in San Francisco. CA will unveil its newest title, Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated, co-authored by CA Technologies John Michelsen, chief technology officer and Jason English, director, CA Service Virtualization.

CA Technologies will host an exclusive Reality is Overrated book signing event in the Tap and Brew Lounge at OpenWorld2012 and present how service virtualization enables enterprises to develop better software applications.

Special Events for CA at OracleWorld on October 2, 2012:

• 10:15 - 11:15 AM PDT - John Michelsen presents “Reality is Overrated – Enterprise Agile Requires a Virtual World” in Moscone South (Room 236).
• 11:30 - 1:00 PM PDT. Book Signing - Attendees will be able to meet the authors and receive signed copies of the book at the CA Technologies-sponsored Tap and Brew Lounge in Moscone South

Visitors to the CA Technologies-sponsored Tap and Brew Lounge refreshment zone will have an opportunity to meet product experts to learn more about CA Technologies Service Virtualization (SV) solutions during OpenWorld.

Find us there and Follow our media team on Twitter via @svcvirt, #svworks and #oow hashtags.

SV Book Trailer Part 3: No Pain, All Gain

Who says every major gain in IT productivity and efficiency must come with a painful, disruptive price tag of change? It's not nearly as difficult as most changes you've tried. In this video preview the authors of "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated" (Michelsen, English) point out that achieving results with SV is not as hard as you might think.

 

To sign up for updates on the book and read Chapter 4 ahead of time, join the community for Service Virtualization at http://servicevirtualization.com/book - on ServiceVirtualization.com. News, commentary, reviews, upcoming author appearances and interviews will be featured there and on their twitter feed at @svcvirt.

SV Book Trailer Part 2: Virtual Model Boogaloo

Continuing the series of preview trailers for the upcoming book "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated," authors Michelsen, English describe how SV practices reflect a rapid behavioral shift in software development.

 

To check out a sample chapter of the book, join the forum for SV at http://servicevirtualization.com/book - on ServiceVirtualization.com. The latest news and supporting info on the book, including upcoming author appearances and interviews, will be featured there.

Service Virtualization: The Trailer of The Book - Part 1

What is the upcoming "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated" book about, and why do the authors have a problem with reality? Watch the first quick trailer for the upcoming best practices book from CA Press, coming October 2012.

 

To read more about the book, see a sample chapter, and preorder, just visit http://servicevirtualization.com/book - on ServiceVirtualization.com. The latest news and supporting info on the book, including upcoming author appearances and interviews, will be featured there.

Book Preview: "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated" Coming 10-1-2012.

We're virtually chuffed about an upcoming business and technology book -- the first definitive guide to the IT and business practice of SV, titled "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated" and coming out internationally on CA Press October 1, 2012.

Your authors, John Michelsen and Jason English, recounted early attempts at simulation, plumbed real project data, and interviewed IT leaders from real companies fighting to innovate in a very complex world - using a new kind of fake software. As it turns out, the most successful innovators in this book didn't just depend on a new vendor platform or more boxes in their lab to become more agile and deliver better, faster and cheaper than their competition. They changed their own perception of reality first.

Other industries, from civil engineering, to pharmaceuticals, to aeronautics, understand the need for modeling and simulation using virtual reality throughout design and development of new products. So why has IT fallen so far behind? Every day companies make the headlines and fail the innovation race by delivering software that is late to market, poorly performing and costly to maintain.

This book will get to the root causes of the enterprise's reluctance to adopt Service Virtualization, and recount how leading edge customers have overcome skepticism to achieve new levels of agility and efficiency without the constraints that hold back traditional development.

Not a book strictly for techies, but certainly not for dummies either, Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated provides valuable management insight into how companies plan SV adoption, and measure results. If you can't read, there are dozens of pretty pictures in here.

Preview Offer at http://servicevirtualization.com/book:

Check out a Preview of Chapter 4 which outlines the challenges that drive the need for Service Virtualization, and see what's in store here. As it turns out, virtual services are better than the real thing, most of the time.

The book will be available in bookstores, Amazon, as well as eBook versions from our publisher apress. Participants in the ServiceVirtualization.Com community can also qualify for a free copy of the upcoming book by participating in discussions.

 

Winning the Service Virtualization Gold at DirecTV

Agile delivery teams are not going to win gold at the track meet this year in London. You won't see synchronized software development and testing teams swimming together in perfect time. Application performance experts won't be sticking the dismount after a high-speed vault. But we do like to think that in some small way, our advances in Service Virtualization may help our customers at DirecTV bring those performances into our living rooms this summer.

Check out this latest video interview with Mike Benson, DirecTV's CIO on how Service Virtualization with CA LISA solutions enabled their company to make virtual dev and test environments available in minutes, not days.

 

Service Virtualization (SV), whether accessed from a developer's laptop, or shared by distributed teams using private Cloud labs, equates to a huge boost in productivity and performance for this entertainment firm's IT development and integration projects.

When the old way of manually configuring test infrastructure and coding mocks is dispensed with, their lifecycle shrinks, and product can be delivered to market faster, with better quality and a competitive price for customers.

Just like the world's premier athletic competition this summer, the stakes for enterprises to continuously innovate and deliver flawlessly have never been higher. Defining moments create the impetus for new and ever-increasing customer expectations, and that equates to big differentiators in a competitive market. By simulating and eliminating constraints from the SDLC, DirecTV has positioned their application development and performance strategy to win.

Study Shows Software Constraints Affect Business Results: Shridhar's Perspective

A new CA-sponsored study, initially in UK, France, Germany describes how software constraints are impacting business results. Read the perspective on ServiceVirtualization.com from ITKO GM Shridhar Mittal, and Download your own copy here: http://servicevirtualization.com/profiles/blogs/new-study-reveals-the-business-benefits-of-service-virtualization.

Look for more global studies as we continue to realize the impact of Service Virtualization across markets.

You Can't Cheat This voke Service Virtualization Test, Because It's a Survey

Hey, we heard from the excellent analysts at voke, inc. and they have a relatively brief new Industry  Survey they are conducting as a followup to their Market Snapshot on Lifecycle Virtualization (LV) they put out just a few months ago.

This time, they are focusing in specifically on two solution suites within LV that our readers should care intensely about: Service Virtualization and Defect Virtualization. We want you to participate.

Go here to take the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QMXVY7K

In reality-based research like this, the more responses we get from a wider range of business users, the more comprehensive the results can be. Everyone who completes the survey will (optionally) get a follow up email when the research is ready from voke. Go take it now!

Sustaining On Our Own Dingo Food: Virtual Services are Forever

We talk a lot about how Service Virtualization enables dev and test teams to optimize performance and eliminate costly functional errors much earlier. But what about the third, and arguably most important leg for a business? Sustainability. That's the final aspect of industrializing the space of simulating or mocking up the systems in our software environments.

On this topic, I heard a very cool product update from our out-back development shack in Australia. Cam -- one of our earliest product dev and support experts, was always the guy who insisted that ITKO as an organization will "eat our own dog food" and exercise the LISA (now CA LISA) product suite to the fullest -- using LISA.

The ability to sustain a system over time is critical, and it is the biggest measure of delivery success for any customers' IT organization. Call it Six Sigma, or insist on less than 5 minutes downtime a year, reduce critical customer errors to <1 report/month, that's the kind of service levels now demanded in production. Your app team can run 80% test coverage of all known scenarios, tune performance to thousands of TPS at release time -- and still have the system blow up sometime in the future.

So, just how solid is a LISA Virtual Service Environment (VSE)? Cam decided to run our standard benchmark VSE service, which is a virtualized web application that maintains state (meaning it maintains a user or account context, rather than simply producing canned responses).

Here's what he found:

"A 20 virtual user test is run continuously. The test is being executed on the same machine as the virtual service. The machine is a vmware instance of Solaris 11 running on a 4-way host with 8gb of RAM. The plan is to keep this machine up as long as possible to demonstrate what is clearly a very stable system.

"The transaction run rate on this machine is about 1200/second. That's not particularly high; the same benchmark gets about 4700 transactions per second on a late model mac book pro. The point of the test here was to prove longevity and stability more than raw throughput.

"By 12 days, we were just over a billion transactions...the performance is constant. The test runner reported 0 errors in the test case, which is specifically designed to detect any session leakage in the VSE. Heap sizes and CPU consumption is stable.

"We are playing both sides of the transaction, and this shows that CA LISA's Test and VSE sides are both rock solid (If anything, we found it to have fewer performance drags than the typical VM images they may run inside!).

"We have LISA test cases driving the VSE and it's a non-trivial test and a non-trivial stateful virtual service. It has to maintain sessions and state for each session. Each individual vuser is looking for evidence of (a) no session state and (b) session leakage -- that a given vuser might be getting data meant for other vusers. The test fails if either condition happens.

"At 62 days we have now reached 6 billion transactions, and we have 0 failures. It's pretty cool."

Pretty cool indeed, Cam. Here's to the development team of LISA for paying appropriate attention to the third leg of reliability: sustainability. And Cam for providing these fun results.

This was just one example of a soak test -- We love to geek out on this kind of thing so stay tuned for more exercises in benchmarking from the CA LISA labs!

6 Top SV Mind Tricks: "These are not the virtual services you are looking for"

We've seen a growing phenomenon of misdirection going on lately in the market of Service Virtualization. Fortunately, last time we looked up Service Virtualization on Wikipedia - someone got the definition right. Thanks to everyone who updated that page and understood the bigger picture here. It can be difficult to maintain perspective when there are so many sources touting different meanings of the words "service" and "virtualization" used together.

What is the reason for such a masquerade, and why would someone describe things that are not virtual services as virtual services? Perhaps this is simply an unintentional mislabeling, but just as often this means someone is selling software or delivery capabilities that are either not ready, or never will become what we define as Service Virtualization.

Here's the top 6 kinds of "Fake Virtual Services" we are not looking for, but getting anyway:

1. Test Stubs as Virtual Services: This is by far the most common fake VS we find lately. The market for Software Testing tools is very crowded and tough, so you will find that any testing tool that allows you to enter a request/response pair as a step within the context of their test, will start calling that stub a Virtual Service. That's a far cry from dynamically built and intelligent virtual services that support stateful transactions, performance characteristics, etc.

2. Virtual Machines as Virtual Services: Conventional virtualization still pops up as a compare-and-contrast with SV. Indeed, those hardware or server virtualization solutions can "Virtualize an Entire Environment" for software development -- IF AND ONLY IF the entire environment is in scope. While they can image hard drives, desktop software and CPUs very productively, VM's cannot handle the heaviest and most constrained assets in your enviroment, nor will they be able to image or replicate anything that is "out of scope" for your team.

3. Manually Built Libraries as Virtual Services: This one may be hard to identify, as it often comes from within your own company or its partners. You may have a team of engineers who have painstakingly coded and maintained their own "Responder Framework" of mock services intended to support the other end of a needed transaction. Inevitably these manually coded elements are brittle and require an ever increasing amount of maintenance over time - leading to the question "Is my team spending time developing and assuring useful functionality -- or managing stubs?"

4. Service Directories as Service Virtualization: Around the time we were rolling out the first SV systems for end customers in 2006-2007, there was another definition floating around among integration vendors that basically called UDDI directories with "pointers" or dynamic links to the locations of given web services objects Service Virtualization. That was correct on the "Service" part and nice for governing or managing services, but it didn't really represent virtualizing anything except for being able to change a link to a WSDL.

5. Cloud-Covered Service Virtualization: This is the latest fad in fake SV. Cloud is great, it is on-demand, has virtually unlimited elastic capacity, instantaneous deployment of servers, reduced cost etc. But it won't eliminate dependencies by itself. If you are doing any heavy enterprise integration work leveraging Cloud, you will also need a robust enough Service Virtualization solution to solve the "wires hanging out" that will still constrain capacity for any serious enterprise software implementation.

6. Outsourced Labor as Service Virtualization: Of all these mind tricks, this one actually made the most logical sense and was the easiest to spot. It simply means you get people somewhere else to be your "virtual assistants" and do things for you. Still popular in practice but fortunately we stopped seeing services firms call it SV or virtual services. I think they just call it outsourcing or contracting services again.

Service Virtualization must cover a lot of ground in order to eliminate the most complex constraints, because they don't happen at any one single point in your architecture. Your best defense is to understand that while virtual services are lightweight, they are not simply generated via a quick slight of hand or misdirection.

Virtual Services should be based on very detailed and intelligent observation of everything your teams must connect to, and scaled to industrial readiness through automation.

Educate yourself on Service Virtualization. You can't fake out a professional faker. Once you are aware of the above "mind tricks," and ask for delivered proof of the real core capabilities of SV, you will much more easily be able to spot fake virtual services when they are presented to you.

And then you can go about your business.

CloudLuminaries Video: Leveraging Cloud & Service Virtualization at DirecTV

Just saw a very good interview with DirecTV's CIO Mike Benson, talking about how his development and test strategy uses Cloud-based resources alongside ITKO's virtual service environments to accelerate time to market for more than 25 million customers.

 

Mike talks about how for faster development, it is important to have an environment that "feels like the real thing." That's exactly the kind of approach we would encourage. Setting up virtual environments can take minutes, versus hours or days compared to production-style test labs - and the results are far more predictable and stable.

We highly recommend visiting CA's Cloud and Innovation Luminaries sites for many more great customer stories like this one. Stop by our friends at http://www.CA.com/CloudLuminaries for more high-business value video.

 

Service Virtualization market covered in SearchSOA

Great far-reaching Service Virtualization market overview this week in TechTarget (SearchSOA) by George Lawton - "Service Virtualization arises to meet services testing obstacles"

Read here: http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/2240150279/Service-virtualization-arises-to-meet-services-testing-obstacles

Dubie on Service Assurance Daily: The Best Kept Technology Secret

We just saw an excellent new article posted by Denise Dubie on the popular blog Service Assurance Daily -- covering the advance of the market for Service Virtualization:

Letting You In On The Best Kept Technology Secret
Service virtualization isn’t new, but it’s getting renewed interest from some big vendors and for good reason.

Indeed we have seen SV go from the purview of just a couple very early adopters in 2007 to something that multiple major players are now serving in the market. Why is this change happening so fast right now?

Fundamentally we are all aware of the increase in complexity in our business applications, driven by the increasing expectations of customers. Forces that affect the largest enterprises are even harder to tackle. Million-hour integration projects for mergers, ever-expanding data needs, massive capacity and access constraints and limited budgets despite the need for more functionality.

We need to simulate and isolate ourselves from all of the above issues much earlier in development, if we expect our fragile software infrastructures to adapt with the needs of our enterprise. We aren't talking about simple problems, and the stakes are huge here.

Service Virtualization isn't going to be a secret for long with the advances we are seeing in this space. I recommend you join the conversation going on at www.ServiceVirtualization.com, where you will see multiple customers, service providers and vendors talking about this technology and new business practices that takes a page from other industries that are already familiar with the concept of robust simulation or virtualization for better product development.

Story: http://www.serviceassurancedaily.com/2012/05/letting-you-in-on-the-best-kept-technology-secret/

 

 

ServiceVirtualization.Com Webinar Preview with Gartner, CA (ITKO), Burt

Looking for non-vendor specific best practices advice and commentary from peer companies that have tried and learned how to succeed (or fail) at Service Virtualization? There's a community site coming up that will help professional of all companies share valuable lessons on how to best employ this transformational technology as an everyday practice to make application development better, faster and cheaper.

 

Hear John discuss why the new ServiceVirtualization.Com community is happening and join him at the upcoming webinar:

Webinar: Parallel Development with Service Virtualization
with Gartner, ITKO (CA) content on http://www.servicevirtualization.com.

Global run times:

• May 16, 2012 | 1:00PM Central US - North America
• May 17, 2012 | 1:00PM AEST (GMT +10:00) Asia/Pacific
• May 17, 2012 | 10:00AM GMT Europe/UK

The first cool thing happening on this new site is an upcoming webinar featuring:

• Gartner research director Tom Murphy discussing the current state of Parallel Development given an increasing amount of complexity and change in today's apps that inhibits software teams best attempts at Agile.
• ITKO founder / CA distinguished engineer John Michelsen talking about the advance of Service Virtualization practices for faster time-to-market by replacing production-style software labs with virtual service environments
• Burt Klein, customer advocate for ServiceVirtualization.com and one of the first leaders of Service Virtualization practices as a former SVP of Performance and Resiliency at a top 5 global bank, discusses how his teams drastically shortened release cycles while improving performance by "shifting quality left" at integration testing - using service virtualization to remove as much as $60M or more of infrastructure cost.

We'll be on the community. So will our customers and partners. And so will other software companies. Why are we all there? Service Virtualization is not just software you buy, it is fundamentally something you do.

 

 

 

On CA Communities: Accept Imitations, Not Limitations

I recently caught up with the "Consumer-Driven IT" CA Communities team about contributing an introduction to the concept and practice of Service Virtualization (SV) for their blog. You can read the results here:

Consumer Driven IT: Accept Imitations, but Not Limitations

The message of SV resonates really well with today's most pressing Consumer-Driven IT challenges. Companies are being driven to release new applications to market faster than ever, through new channels that reach customers where they are: whether that means mobile devices, Cloud-based apps, within new social communities and trading networks.

But underneath all these new delivery methods, none of the existing infrastructure and complexity ever goes away -- in fact we have more change and chaos than ever, keeping track of partner applications as well as our critical mainframes and transaction services.

The only safe way to successfully reach market in such an environment is by using virtual environments throughout development and testing of each new piece of IT or software functionality. Using Service Virtualization, all the teams in these distributed environments get very stable labs that allow them to cover all needed customer scenarios, even if they are unavailable, unready, or undergoing change.

Hope you like the article and check out the many useful updates in CA Communities. Link: http://community.ca.com/blogs/perspectives/archive/2012/05/01/consumer-driven-it-accept-imitations-but-not-limitations.aspx

Be Childish about Service Virtualization

One of the secrets to success with Service Virtualization is being childish. Looking at the many geek toys we often find around active development shops, maybe we don't need to reinforce this point too much - other than asking you to look at SV from a kid's perspective in terms of your real, "Adult-Size" SDLC issues...

When it comes down to it, we could probably learn a couple more tips on virtual environments from little kids:

1. Intuition: Kids tend to have an an extrasensory capacity at times, as they don't have as many assumptions to draw upon... maybe if we used our intuition a little more we would not only trust the virtual environment, we would also gain a better sense for predicting errors much earlier in our own development processes.
   
   
2. Frankness: Kids haven't yet learned to candy-coat their opinions. "You smell bad. Why are you so bald?" This frankness is exactly what we need more of in development - rather than building based on an ideal world and happy-path verifications of functionality, let's use service virtualization to automate the capture of a much clearer reflection of the environments around our apps, warts and all.
   
   
3. Imagination: Kids have no trouble at all believing in, and playing in a virtual reality. You know the game where every couch and chair is a raft, and the rest of the floor is shark-infested water or lava? The real world has conditioned us grownups to distrust anything that isn't real -- but in the case of SV, we need to realize that the fake is BETTER than the real thing for most of the SDLC.

If kids can teach us adults some new tricks, it is that imagination and virtualization are kind of similar - they can enable us to "play anywhere" without requiring a huge amount of set building, money and prep time. If we want to make development fun again, having a virtual world to develop and test without constraints seems like an excellent place to start.

Mainframe Service Virtualization - It's a Big Deal

We don't spend enough time talking about mainframes on this blog, other than as "those back-end constraints" in a composite app. But over the last year, especially working with CA customers, we have gained a tremendous appreciation for all the dev work that happens within the mainframe world - as it offers a great new arena for capturing value and increasing agility. I just made a new video about it here:

 

For most enterprises, business rides on the mainframe. In these groups you have all the same constraints we see in composite applications and the service-oriented world: different teams, maintaining business logic for interconnected components, across different CICS regions, data sources like DB2, ADABAS, IMS services, and so on. Mainframe dev teams often find themselves constrained for access, waiting for critical data scenarios to be set up in other mainframe regions, and in conflict over resources.

IT Operations teams don’t want to rock the boat for real customers by allowing developers and testers to play “under the hood,” yet new test region environments can be extremely difficult and expensive to produce. Service Virtualization should be practiced in a similar fashion within the mainframe, capturing and modeling dependencies between components. For instance, simulating the other half of CICS-CICS transactions, or gathering scenarios from an IMS region as it makes calls to the data layer so we don't need to impact the real thing.

In short, don’t leave efficiencies on the table in Mainframe. We must ensure that we liberate Mainframe development of constraints with Service Virtualization in addition to the upstream application layers.

Putting Service Virtualization to Work takes People, Process, THEN Technology

The last month has been extremely fun here at CA's ITKO campus in Plano, Texas - with a lot of fresh new faces from around the world, including many peers from our favorite technology companies (and competitors) participating in orientation.

When you join an enterprise software company, you fully expect to get a massive dose of product information. But that isn't the whole story - as focusing on the Delivery aspect of our solutions is just as critical as any feature/function talks about LISA software. It's still "People, Process, Technology" in that order for a reason, right?

In our engagements we've found certain organizational decisions that dramatically impact the value a company receives from their software. Without getting into the finer points of ITKO's own value assessment and delivery process - let's take a look at some examples of these.

1. Set value goals for the first Service Virtualization project up front. While it is tempting for a team to kick off the install ASAP and start virtualizing some annoying constraints, don't skip the value goals. The rest of the organization is watching, and will often meter their expectations of SV based on the success of that first project. Setting a goal and measuring the value from the beginning enables your organization to support future projects with confidence.

2. Get the business to buy in, not just IT. While successful Service Virtualization initiatives offer huge efficiency benefits to the IT group, they usually start with executive sponsorship and an alignment to real, customer-facing business objectives. Time-to-Market usually leads the pack here -- because if a business can depend on delivering a critical new product or service to customers 30-50% faster, without fail, the revenue and cost benefits will certainly follow.

3. Don't "give a fool a tool." Sounds like something our favorite character actor Mr. T would say, but he would probably agree that just handing software licenses to a team of developers or testers (even if they are very smart) and expecting them to "figure it out" will not cut it. Even if the software itself is quite intuitive, it must handle very complex tasks. Modeling today's distributed heterogeneous application environments with Service Virtualization does take  planning and training, so that over time the practice can be grown as a core competency of the organization.

4. Expect growing pains. A Service Virtualization implementation should never force your teams to disrupt their development process tools of choice, nor "rip and replace" existing integration and business applications. However, once the ability to "virtualize everything" becomes understood, it will cause ripples throughout the organization.

SV will certainly cause a change in mindset, and raise the bar for delivering faster releases with higher quality. The most highly valued teams will thrive by learning new skills, such as identifying and replacing external constraints, collaborating with more distributed teams to resolve issues and dependencies, and leveraging virtual services for parallel development.

These are just a few adoption trends we've noticed in the field. At ITKO we have a proven strategic delivery practice and roadmap for CA LISA Service Virtualization implementation and rollout, at many of the world's largest enterprises, working alongside leading Services partners. In the "New Virtual" world of Service Virtualization-based software labs, a strong methodology backed by experienced service delivery teams are the key to realizing lasting customer success.

Video: Parallel Development - The Ultimate Use Case for Service Virtualization

ITKO introduced the concept of Service Virtualization into LISA in 2007.  At the time, the IT analysts didn't get it, and when we introduced the technology to customers in the field, our prospects said things like "that's not possible" or "that would be magic." Well, those very folks have been using our technology in all kinds of impossible and magical ways ever since.

We love seeing how customers can leverage this ability to model and simulate their application and service behaviors in a wide variety of ways.  

Just one of the many novel ways customers employ SV is for virtual Training environments. Think about it.  You need to train thousands of field agents on the new versions of your Point-of-Sale system... How can you stand up systems for training them all without massive infrastructure challenges?  Well, now they run a "better than real" app on the trainee's laptop in our Virtual Service Environment and costs next to nothing to stand up that whole environment.

Yet for all the wonderful ways that virtual services can do the impossible and seem like magic, I believe that leveraging the full capability of our CA-LISA platform for Parallel Development might be the greatest impact we can deliver to a development organization.

 

To help show how LISA's capabilities can solve possibly your greatest challenge as a development organization, I recorded this video that documents a "tale of two Telcos."  One Telco is embarking on the transition of their IT systems to LTE/4G and is now facing this parallel development challenge. The other Telco is a little farther down the path, and has leveraged LISA to make parallel development radically faster and more effective.

If you only watch one video on how to leverage Virtual Services and/or CA-LISA itself to reshape your development lifecycles, I hope you will watch this one.

Thanks for watching.

Video: Stubs & Mocks vs. Virtual Services

Reading this blog you know that we are convinced — and have plenty of evidence to prove that conviction — that Virtual Services have a transformational effect on your dev and testing capabilities. The whole concept of virtual services is to provide productized technology for the general science discipline of modeling and simulation.

Well many of you already build and maintain a form of that now: stubbing, mocking, a responder framework, echo server, dev harnesses… you call them all kinds of things.

Well then what's the difference?  How is the capacity CA LISA provides for virtual services any different than what your development team might already be doing with stubs or mocks?

 

 

The video here points right at the heart of that question.  For those who like to read the book and avoid the movie, stubs vs. virtual services is essentially simplistic behavior models versus intelligent ones.  Simplistic models can give you a false sense of productivity early in a dev cycle, but they set you up for significant integration issues, late defect discovery and troublesome scalability blind spots. Only early development sees some infrastructure issues answered by the use of stubs - but not the rest of your integration and test cycles.  Conversely, virtual services can carry you from design all the way thru delivery and help you solve those issues.

So I hope you watch the video for a more elaborate explanation and let me know what you think.

Australia vs. the World: Service Virtualization Critical in Good and Bad Economic Times

Why is Service Virtualization (SV) so huge down under in ANZ, as well as here in North America? I recently returned from another tour of Australia and was met by a writer for their IT Wire publication about the high level of adoption of LISA's Service Virtualization software by most of the leading financial and telco IT shops in the region:

IT Wire Article: ITKO LISA simplifies testing of composite systems through simulation

Australia is the alternate proof point for much of the rest of the world, demonstrating how Service Virtualization is mandatory in both good times and bad.

When times are GOOD, businesses demand faster time-to-market and more aggressive software delivery schedules to capitalize on ideal conditions. While the rest of the world was feeling an economic pinch in 2008, Australia had strong resources and a growing economy - therefore they needed unconstrained development, to seize on business opportunities in Asia and the rest of the world.

A small company gets better and bigger by being aggressive with its IT investments in good times. That's why you began to see virtually every bank in Australia as well as other IT-enabled companies radically accelerating their development shops by adopting virtual service environments and even private DevTest Clouds over the last 3 years.

But what about bad economic times? We are more familiar with that story for the last 3 years in North America and Europe. Overall budget slashes and IT cost-cutting measures are happening across the economy. Yet many companies still invested in Service Virtualization when times were bad. Why?

Increasing IT efficiency in bad times with SV allows companies to keep their existing employees making gains in productivity, simulate and adjust to the impact of meeting new regulations, reduce costly defects, retain customers, and operate their systems with less infrastructure and cost.

Companies don’t generally grow relative to each other in good times, they do in BAD times. You need to invest in operational efficiencies such as Service Virtualization not just in good times, but throughout hard times. The companies that can deliver on their promises while maintaining high quality will retain customers, and further, those that can innovate through hard times will gain customers and come out ahead when good times return.