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

2008 - Record Year for iTKO

You might have noticed, on this blog we usually stick to topics like IT and industry best practices for SOA, BPM, Virtualization, Governance and the like, rather than talk about ourselves.

However, we have just put out a press release on a very successful 2008 for iTKO, and we couldn't be prouder to be able to continue this level of success in a challenging market, so please give us a pass to reflect on this progress for a moment here.

Thanks to all our customers and partners for helping us achieve another record revenue year for iTKO. The fact that companies are still making the decision to move forward now to realize the benefits of SOA quality and Service Virtualization means that LISA solutions have been identified as a key way to uncover new value, while eliminating risks and cost from the software delivery lifecycle.

iTKO revenues were up more than 100 percent, from both new customers and increased LISA adoption in our customer base. We released version 4.5 of our flagship iTKO LISA product suite, which added service virtualization for load and performance testing, and other customer-driven enhancements. In November, iTKO brought LISA Eclipse Edition to market, for more comprehensive test coverage within the application lifecycle.

Thanks also to the analysts and media who tracked our progress and engaged us in conversations this last year. We picked up a few awards also. LISA was honored in April by TechTarget's SearchSOA.com with a Gold Award for Service Performance Product of the Year. LISA was also selected as a Finalist in the Great Indian Developer Awards 2008, and just recently LISA Virtualize was voted the Best Integration Solution by SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 delegates.

EuroSTAR 2009 Conference will be in Stockholm

I recently received the first issue of the STAR Tester Newsletter for 2009. We're still a long way off, but they are already accepting presentations. This year’s conference theme is: ‘Testing for Real, Testing for Now’. The EuroSTAR 2009 Conference will be in Stockholm, 30th November – 3rd December 2009.

This is a great annual European event, we enjoyed participating last year, and iTKO's own John Michelsen spoke on SOA Testing, Validation & Virtualization. Here are two extensive reviews of the 2008 version that occurred in den Haag, Thoughts About EuroStar 2008 by Randy Rice and Notes from EuroSTAR 2008 by Rikard Edgren. Randy wrote that “One of my tests of a good conference is whether I'm torn between attending track sessions - and I was.” The theme of that conference was "The Future of Software Testing.”

There is a EuroSTAR community blog to support the event. The blog says that it is “...dedicated to Software Testers worldwide. We hope that this blog will allow testers to share their individual EuroSTAR experiences and also give testers new to EuroSTAR, a glimpse of what the event is all about. This forum should also act as a place where testers can interact, discuss issues important to them and debate the most up to date trends within Software Testing.”  I am sure activity will pick up there as we get closer to the conference. 

Sandy Kemsley's "Column 2" Blog - BPM, Enterprise 2.0 and More

Sandy Kemsley is an independent analyst and systems architect, specializing in business process management, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise architecture and business intelligence. She also writes the great blog, Column 2 on “BPM, Enterprise 2.0 and technology trends in business.” In the blog Sandy provides links to stuff she finds interesting and her own summary.

The longer posts include a lot of event commentary. I liked her summary of a recent Gartner webinar covering what to do in your first 100 days as a BP Director. Just like the first 100 days of a presidency, this time period sets the tone for BPM efforts. The Gartner content was sound, but Sandy added that the actions are more likely to take 18 months rather than three. She said that the complete webinar is likely available for replay and Gartner has two BPM conferences coming up: February 23-25 in London, and March 23-25 in San Diego.

There was also a useful case study on BPM at West Bend Insurance. To be able to better compete in the small business market they used BPM with a focus on reducing the quote-to-issue time from days or weeks down to just minutes or hours. The case study webinar was sponsored by a BPM vendor but as Sandy wrote, “the BPM philosophy and agile methods that they used can be used with pretty much any BPM product: that’s more an issue of corporate culture than the specific product, as long as it provide model-driven process development.”

Sandy has been in the IT space for over 20 years including time at IBM. Since 2001, she has been a maintained a consulting practice as a BPM architect, performing engagements for financial services and insurance organizations across North America, and as an analyst working with BPM vendors. She also creates and delivers BPM and related training courses. So if you are looking at some ways to achieve business-driven improvements in IT, take a look (and so will we).

European BPM Related Conferences for 2009

As I have been looking more closely at BPM in Europe, I come across a number of interesting conferences in this space. Here is what I found so far. They are listed in order of appearance. Let me know if I left any good ones out.

Data Governance Conference Europe 2009 will be held in London on 2 – 5 February. Topics include SOA and data governance. There are a number of high profile case studies. It is sponsored by IRM UK, the people who also do The Business Process Management Conference Europe 2009 and Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2009.

Gartner Business Process Management Summit will be held in London 23-25 February. The theme is "Thrive, survive, and capitalize."

CeBIT will be held 3-8 March in Hanover, Germany. It is the world's largest and most renowned trade fair for the world of IT and telecommunications. iTKO will be participating in this event with our Germany channel partners Penta-T, as well as participating in the Software AG exposition area.

Service Oriented Architecture Conference 2009 will be held on 12 March in London. It is sponsored by IDC.

2nd International Conference on Business Process and Services Computing will be held on 22-24 March in Leipzig Germany.

Process Excellence Summit will be held in London on 20-23 April. It is sponsored by IQPC. It says that it will “provide you with accurate and forward thinking updates on how an integrated model of Lean, Six Sigma, OPEX and Business Process Management is evolving towards Business Transformation.”

Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2009 will be held in London, 8-10 June. “This 10th Annual Enterprise Architecture Conference will evaluate what works best in different business environments, and what doesn’t, through practical case studies and examples from Global 2000 companies and major public services.” It is sponsored by IRM UK.

Gartner SOA & Application Development and Integration Summit will be held in London, 24-25 June. It covers Application Integration and Middleware Software, Data Access Middleware, Service-Oriented Architecture, Web Services.

7th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2009) will be held 7-10 September in Ulm, Germany. The deadline for papers is 14 March.

The Business Process Management Conference Europe 2009 will be held in London 28-30 September. The Call for Papers for this event will be issued in February 2009. It is in the early stage and the site mostly supplies information on last year's conference. It is sponsored by IRM UK, the people who also do Data Governance Conference Europe 2009 and Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2009.

EuroSTAR 2009 Conference will be held 30 November to 3 December in Stockholm. This year's conference theme is: "Testing for Real, Testing for Now"

AppGap Covers iTKO’s New Service Virtualization and SOA Governance Offerings

The AppGap recently had a post by Bill Ives that covers our new service virtualization and SOA governance capabilities, titled "iTKO Expands the Agility of Enterprise 2.0 with New Service Virtualization and SOA Governance Offerings." John Michelsen, iTKO’s Founder/Chief Geek; and Chris Kraus, iTKO LISA Product Manager were interviewed.  

Chris said that with LISA, iTKO has integrated the leading governance vendors’ policies to directly launch our testing and validation services, and feed the results back into the SOA Registry/Repository, so that SOA policies can be better enforced with automated validation procedures.

The post spent more time talking about our newer service virtualization capabilities. It mentioned how iTKO takes the virtualization concept a step beyond hardware and desktop virtualization with service virtualization. Now you can virtualize the behavior of services even if they are unavailable or not yet developed. The post says that service virtualization can greatly reduce the dependencies between development and QA, and between the core service provider and the business solution service consumer.

Bill wrote a prior post last summer, - iTKO LISA - Software Validation and Testing at the Speed of Enterprise 2.0 that covered our basic capabilities. In this post Bill wrote, "...that iTKO has further revived up the speed with these expansions."  We greatly appreciate these thoughts, and recommend you read this and other interesting posts from Bill and other bloggers on new E2.0 technologies. 

Some European Blogs Related to BPM and SOA

I have been looking across the pond for European bloggers that cover BPM and SOA.  As we've said in a couple previous posts, in many ways, European companies seem to be jumping into SOA with both feet, but that is often a result of years of practice in BPM - BPM-driven SOA. Anyway, here are some interesting blogs I found, and let us know if you have some other favorites we should review.

ARIS BPM Blog has a number of members and a robust European blogger community.  The About section reads, “In line with our motto “We Love BPM”, the official IDS Scheer Weblog regularly provides the international community with information on BPM and related topics, such as EA, SOA, Process Intelligence, Six Sigma and Compliance. The authors are experts from IDS Scheer, non-profit organizations, companies and universities. We invite the BPM community to actively participate by commenting on the posts.”

CIO Magazine UK has several blogs. They include: The Server Room - that helps keep readers up to date with the latest trends in servers and virtualization, and the CIO blog written by the CIO of Newham, a London borough in transition.

Computerworld UK also has a collection of blogs from practitioners, as well as syndicated analyst commentary. Here are some examples of what you can find there:

Computerworld UK: "The final front tier of SOA" – is written by Dharmesh Mistry who has supported financial services organizations with technology and management expertise for over 20 years. Dharmesh is currently the acting CTO of edge IPK, focusing on developing and launching an Open Presentation Platform built on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Computerworld UK: "TechSpectic" is described as “hype busting thoughts from the Editor in Chief of CIO magazine.

Computerworld UK: "Test driven" is written by David Evans, the Director of Methodology at software quality and testing consultancy SQS. The blogs says that “these are the ruminations of a software quality methodologist, and friends.”

Computerworld UK: "Forrester View: Application Development & Programme Management" – “Forrester Research analysts comment on issues critical to application development and programme management professionals.”

Computerworld UK: "Burton Blogs: Executive Advisory" is written to “keep you up to date with the mutually dependent, relationships that IT and the business have with each other and how to make changes that utilise each other's progress.”

Enterprising Architecture: EA Driven BPM is written by Kapil Pant in the IT Toolbox. Kapil is a Sr. Consultant/Practice Manager of BPM in the UK.  The blog is about “aligning your enterprise roadmap or architecture to execution and montoring for overall enterprise agility.”

IT Directions is an eBizQ blog written by Keith Harrison-Broninski. Keith is the CTO of Role Modellers Ltd, whose “company mission is to develop understanding and support of collaborative human work processes across industry, a field that Keith has pioneered with his work on Human Interaction Management.”

The mwd blog (which we are already quite familiar with and read regularly) covers “IT business alignment and related things.”  Macehiter Ward-Dutton is a specialist IT advisory firm which combines industry research and analysis with tailored consulting services, and is focused exclusively on issues surrounding IT-business alignment.”  UK based. The contributors include Nell Macehiter, Nell Ward-Dutton, Angela Ashenden, and Bola Rotibi.

Peter Borner’s Blog – Peter is with the UK division of Microsoft partner Axispoint – they have 3 other blogs.  Peter’s blog covers BPM.

The Process Performance Blog is written by Mark McGregor, a UK consultant. It is part of IT-Director.com. It covers Business Process Management (BPM), Business Transformation and Enterprise Architecture Blog. Here is a sample post. Are you really doing BPM?

Singularity blog covers BPM and brings in relevant pop references to Malcolm Gladwell, James Bond, and Bob Dylan.  Singularity is a provider of Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow solutions.

Sourcingmag.com – blogosphere is a UK blog community with 19 bloggers. You can become a blogger by going to their site. Sourcingmag.com offers practical advice for IT and business process outsourcing.

Chris Kraus Quoted in Processor Magazine on Cloud Computing

Processor Magazine published the article, Cloud & Virtualized Systems – Development and Testing Challenges, by Kurt Marko in today's (January 16) issue. Kurt interviewed several subjects for the piece, and it makes for an interesting blend of perspectives from the analyst and vendor community.

Kurt's article begins with the forecast, “The consensus forecast for cloud computing is definitely sunny” and adds, “After several years of hype, cloud computing is poised to make the jump from vaporware vision to mainstream IT solution; however, moving enterprise applications to the cloud is anything but a turnkey process.”  The article then goes into detail on the process of successfully implementing cloud computing.

One of the challenges covered in the piece is the difficulty of replicating the number, diversity, and geographic distribution of needed clients when testing. There are two strategies for solving this problem: behavioral simulation and synthetic virtualized test environments. The article mentions that Chris Kraus, product manager at iTKO advocates functional and load simulation of the application, as well as the 3rd party cloud services that represent costs and dependencies:

“You want something that looks enough like the cloud for your test purposes,” Chris says. These simulations can monitor the cloud vendors’ performance and service levels, but Kraus stresses that verification must be done regularly, if not continuously, to ensure vendors meet SLA uptime requirements and performance levels under all conditions.  There are more interesting ideas here and it is worth looking at the entire piece.

Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development - Part Six: Complete Strategy with Service Virtualization

This is the last post in our six-part series on Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development. The series covers how service virtualization complements hardware virtualization with the ability to reduce cost and increase business agility across the entire software lifecycle.

The complete white paper can be downloaded at Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development. In this post we look at a reference architecture when service architecture is added. Now we can finish solving the problems we encountered in the middle tier. We can create virtual models, modify the models to suit our needs, and enable that parallel development that we were lacking in the previous picture.

Once services are virtualized, and not just hardware, we are good to go for parallel development. Below is a diagram of the architecture:

In addition to virtual hardware, in the back end, we can take those constrained services and system resources we couldn't replicate via hardware virtualization, and make them 24/7 accessible. We can take things that had capacity constraints, for example the performance lab that could only do 10 TPS against the back-end systems, and virtualize it to allow hundreds or thousands of transactions.

I also get data consistency. I can drive the specific data scenarios that I want. I can get predictable, stable data across a variety of systems – even the systems that I do not own and control, and that’s crucial for any distributed system.

And finally, I can desensitize my sensitive systems -- take away those security constraints. The process is very much the same for hardware virtualization or service virtualization. When I virtualize a piece of hardware, I take an image of the disk. In a virtual service, you image the behavior of a particular service. You construct the virtual service from that behavior, and then you deploy it to a virtual service environment. Same steps, but different tools, and different outcomes based on the type of virtualization you are doing.

In summary, you can completely isolate IT from physical constraints by using Service Virtualization. We invite you to explore how this new strategy can deliver the cost savings and agility you expect across the lifecycle of your entire software infrastructure.

That wraps up our overview of Service Virtualization. We believe there is a huge amount of untapped value to be gained from virtualizing the behaviors of the most constrained and changing elements of business IT.

Here are the first five posts in this series. 

Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development – Part One of Six

Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development – Part Two: Hardware Virtualization

Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development - Part Three: Challenges of Access

Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development - Part Four: When No Virtualization is in Use

Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development - Part Five: Leveraging Hardware Virtualization

SOA World Awards - LISA Virtualize wins "Best Integration Solution"

SYS-CON recently announced its SOA World Conference & Expo Awards.  As their post says, “SOA… has spawned mashups, BPM, SaaS, and even cloud computing - all of them architectural approaches that depend on "services" - continues to have momentum since SOA is not just services, it is about truly transactional services, which are often part of a workflow process.”

At the 14th International SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 West in San Jose, CA SYS-CON Events offered all delegates the opportunity to cast their vote for their favorite SOA technology provider in five highly competitive categories. The results have been announced, and iTKO LISA Virtualize was named “Best Integration Solution.”

Awareness of Service Virtualization as a unique enabler for eliminating the constraints of SOA is growing, and we are very pleased to see Virtualize get specifically recognized by the show delegates.

Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development - Part Five: Leveraging Hardware Virtualization

This is the fifth post in our six part series on, Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development. The series covers how service virtualization complements hardware virtualization with the ability to reduce cost and increase business agility across the entire software lifecycle. The complete white paper can be downloaded at Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development.

In this post, we look at a reference architecture when hardware virtualization is added to the standard architecture presented in my last post. We need to explain this step, because while virtualization at the hardware/OS level is valuable, it is only one form of virtualization for enterprise IT.

Below is a diagram of the architecture.
The market’s concept of hardware virtualization is worth applying, because it’s a good thing and it’s going to get us some value out of the box -- mostly in the middle tier. But there are still issues.
Hardware virtualization gives you the concept of server proliferation (where everybody gets their own server) but it doesn’t require physical assets to do it. This can reduce IT hardware acquisition and support costs significantly.

However, beyond the boxes, we still have difficulties with parallel application development. Realizing that Service2 is not ready for my application to use (e.g., the database in our example above), even running virtualized hardware won’t help me until the development team implements their changes. And unfortunately, I haven’t done anything to alleviate our constraints on accessing the back-end systems; possibly I have made things worse.

Because I still have access issues on the mainframe, I still have capacity constraints throughout development, testing and integration. I still have costly access on the SaaS side, and I still have an insane amount of data volatility, which makes it hard for my team to stabilize the application against the rest of the environment.

Of course, I may also have security concerns when sharing a process among teams, especially when they are distributed across departments or companies. Don't get me wrong -- preventing server proliferation in the datacenter is a good thing, but the largest, most complex systems are not meaningfully affected, and this is still why we need to stay at it and complete our virtualization strategy. In the next post, I will cover what happens when you add service virtualization to the architecture to complete the strategy.

Prioritizing Continuous Validation by Criticality: Private & Federal Sector

We just had a neat little brainstorm here, with some of our smart Solution Architects in town, on the criticality of Validation in Business vs. Federal Govt. So, I wanted to repeat some of the riff here and invite commentary.

In essence, organizations have key processes or mission threads that simply cannot fail, because failure is catastrophic to the bottom line. For instance, in the commercial space, the biggest asset is the customer. Companies place heavy emphasis on customer retention, so any process that directly touches the customer cannot fail. Failure may cause that customer to walk to a competitor. This is why many of iTKO’s customers utilize LISA's continuous validation service (CVS), to continuously validate that key customer-facing processes are behaving correctly.

Now say for instance with an agency like TSA, there are no customers, per se. However, you could consider any traveler a customer of TSA services "i.e. Keep us safe," but there are key processes/mission threads that cannot fail (i.e. Letting a terrorist board an aircraft).

The systems that support keeping terrorists off an airplane need to be continuously validated. Why? - Unexpected consequences. There are probably many other examples of critical mission threads like this in defense, where lives are at stake when processes fail.

Bear in mind, Continuous Validation does not solely get tied to “mission critical” processes, that is just where the most value is gained. Perhaps I want to continuously validate payroll processing or more back-office processes because they are important too, just not as much as keeping a terrorist off a plane.

Some validation processes are tied to physical activities -- mock crisis scenarios and fire drills. However, I don’t want my continuous test to cause a SWAT team to be deployed to the airport every time I validate my process or a plane to be stopped on the tarmac. Continuous Validation should be the "what if" that tells me about unintended consequences, without interfering with my day-to-day operations.

We are familiar with prioritizing Testing around criticality, since we don't have time to test everything, all the time. Maybe you have some similar thoughts about how Validation is prioritized according to real-world criticality?

Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development - Part Four: When No Virtualization is in Use

This is the fourth post in our six part series on, Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development. The series covers how service virtualization complements hardware virtualization with the ability to reduce cost and increase business agility across the entire software lifecycle. The complete white paper can be down loaded at Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development.

In this post we look at a reference architecture when no virtualization is in use to set the stage for adding hardware virtualization and then service virtualization. Below is a diagram of the architecture.
 

This is a simplified but typical application that we see all the time in our customer base. In this case applications have access to a middle-tier set of services, which are built into some kind of application server, integration layer, etc. Those services very frequently make calls out to legacy mainframe systems and third-party hosted applications.

There are lots of challenges here without any virtualization in place:

• Server proliferation in the middle tier to support multiple teams & workflows
• Lots of lost productivity while I wait for things like Service2 (above) to be developed
• Increased cost from third party systems because every time I access that SaaS-based solution or that hosted application it’s costing me money
• Increased risk of production issues because of all these things, including the fact that I can’t do as much repeatable testing because of data volatility.

In the next post, I will cover what happens when you add hardware virtualization to the architecture.

Avoiding SOA Disillusionment - eBizQ Panel Recap

Joe McKendrick recently led an eBizQ panel on Avoiding SOA Disillusionment. Participants included Chris Harding, The Open Group; Phil Wainwright, eBizQ and ZDNet; Jignesh Shah, SoftwareAG; David Bressler, Progress Software; and myself, Chris Kraus, Product Manager, ITKO LISA.

The panel audio is available at this link to the eBizQ panel on Avoiding SOA Disillusionment. You have to register with eBizQ if you have not done so but it is quick and free. Joe put the term “disillusionment” in quotes, as this is a loaded term.  While SOA has shifted the burden from big-bang vendor solutions to internal IT alignment, the recent comments by analysts in this direction. The panelists I joined have not seen disillusionment, but they do see that SOA is no longer seen as the most exciting technology anymore. 

SOA has ridden out the hype curve and people are now settling into implementations and dealing with the new challenges SOA raises in realistic ways.  The implementation process is now more complex for IT because you are dealing with multiple services and not a single vendor you can beat up on.

Several panelists covered how SOA is best presented as a business solution and not an IT solution.  Chris Harding added that it is important to see how are consumers going to use these services now and how they can be reused by others in the long term. This is especially true, as conditions within organizations are constantly changing.

David said that project-oriented IT departments can be counter to achieving a long-term vision as they are rewarded on short-term performance. SOA can highlight some issues within IT departments that may be counter to long-term business success.  Perhaps SOA may require a cultural change within many IT departments.

There is much more to hear on the panel. I think the issues of “disillusionment” are the result of poor implementation strategies, lack of discipline around quality, and/or the use of out of date methods. These issues are not necessarily embedded within SOA. However, it does require new ways of doing things to be successful. The panel covered many of these changes such as Agile development and better use of virtualization to make resources available during the lifecycle. 

The panelists seem to feel that the down economy will help SOA as it is a good way to force companies to become more nimble and it brings cost savings. However, success will depend on how each company responds to the crisis. Do they hunker down, or do they look for innovative ways to survive and grow?

Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development - Part Three: Challenges of Access

This is the third post in our six part series on Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development. The series covers how service virtualization complements hardware virtualization with the ability to reduce cost and increase business agility across the entire software lifecycle.

The complete white paper on Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development can be downloaded from itko.com.

In this post, we move from hardware virtualization approaches to the service virtualization concept. Taking the concept of virtualization all the way into the service interactions and behaviors of my interconnected systems opens up new possibilities. When assets make the migration from the real world into the virtual world, they lose their constraints. I can control their behavior, I can control their capacity, their access, and I can constrain them in the ways that I want – not the ways that the real world imposes upon me. This is exactly the technique this paper covers. See an example below.
Let’s look at an example. First, the current physical environment is shown below. This presents several challenges.
 
Access to a mainframe: The trouble here is that because I’m not the only team in the environment, there are dozens of other project teams; therefore I have very infrequent access to the mainframe.
Access to a database: Another other team owns a database that we access. This database already exists; we even have access to it in a development lab, but we need new stored procedures in that database schema. It will take some 3 or 4 months of negotiating and design work to produce those stored procedures.
Access to the web service: There is a legacy system already deployed, and we’ve decided that as an architectural mandate, we are going to use web services to get at the legacy functionality; which is great — except that the web service doesn’t actually exist yet – we’re still shopping the contract so access is months away. All of the above are very real world constraints — these are nothing that we haven’t heard dozens of times from our customers. So let’s see what service virtualization can do to remove these constraints. We will describe the diagram below form the bottom up.

For mainframe access, build a model of the behavior and then host it as a virtual service in a virtual service environment. For database access, construct a model from the database and make changes as needed within minutes. For web access, construct a virtual service from a WSDL, from SOAP documents, from XML samples: whatever you can give the Virtualization team. Now I will go into these concepts in more detail in the next three posts. In the next post, I will cover reference architectures, starting with Stage One, in which no virtualization in use.

Join Our ITKO Facebook Group on SOA testing and Virtualization

We have started an informal Facebook group on SOA testing and Virtualization for anyone interested in SOA and IT quality, validation and virtualization techniques. Bloggers, fans, LISA users, and anyone else interested in what iTKO is doing welcome.