iTKO and HP recently signed an agreement which created a significant piece of news: "iTKO's LISA Virtualize Software to Be Resold by HP to Reduce Testing Costs and Accelerate Time to Market for Modern Applications"
There is a lot of value to capture here. In every major enterprise IT shop we go into, we find that there are a growing number of constraints to testing created by what the industry is calling "modern apps" -- highly distributed, componentized, loosely coupled applications that no longer reside within a company's four walls. Call it SOA, SaaS, Cloud, pull in BPM, legacy migration, etc. and you have a recipe for quality chaos.
Many of the systems we need for software development are supporting live transactions, contain critical customer data, are inaccessible to the team, and perhaps even charge significant fees for each access. IT shops can literally spend 40-60% of their development time trying to configure test beds, code "test responders" or stubs of needed services, and massaging data into and out of the system before and after each functional and performance test. Faced with these constraints, companies simply do not test as early or often as they should, and quality and performance suffers.
We are familiar with virtualizing servers and desktop apps, but what about the above highly constrained pieces that make up a modern app? These systems are resistant to hardware virtualization, but they can definitely be virtualized behaviorally with LISA, so now HP test and development team members can get access to them on their terms.
This functionality is complementary, but very different from the well-known
practice of hardware-based virtualization, in that it is not imaging a hard
drive or desktop OS as a VM. Instead it is an automated software-based solution
to virtualize the behavior of downstream dependent systems, services, data and
components that may not be under a team's control. There are huge benefits to be gained in terms of faster delivery cycles, fewer production errors, and much lower cost and effort of managing test environments, coding stubs and managing test data.
It's a fact that there are more performance and functional testers with HP's testing software installed than any enterprise solution on the planet. And every one of them could stand to benefit from having robust test environments that are readily available to work with. We think this is great news for the software lifecycle when the world's largest technology companies are working to solve some of the largest problems out there.
Stay tuned for more news about this partnership here.
Recent coverage of the announcement (in progress):
- Dana Gardner in ZDnet: HP Partners with iTKO on LISA Services Testing Suite for SOA, BPM
- Virtualization Journal: We particularly liked an article from Maureen O'Gara: "HP's Got a New Girlfriend Called LISA"
- Vance McCarthy in IDevNews: "HP To Sell iTKO LISA for Virtualized SOA, Apps Testing"
- eBizQ "iTKO's Virtualize Software to be Resold by HP"
- StickyMinds.com News
- Official iTKO release on BusinessWire.
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