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

We're thankful for IT change and complexity in the 00's.

The challenges of change and complexity are what we are thankful for this season here at iTKO - because without them, we frankly wouldn't have much to talk about. Likely, if you are reading this blog, I wager that these two factors might be keeping you up at night. But the source of this change and complexity might not be what you expect.

Simplicity and agility in development, is quite literally becoming the cause of change and complexity in IT, especially in ensuring that a reliably functioning software environment is delivered on time. We have been covering this theme for years - but for some reason it has really turned on the light bulb for IT listeners this year, when pressures to deliver more functionality with less resources have been at their greatest. 

Enterprises tried to reduce release cycles and costs by focusing on one part of the lifecycle: development. They've brought in new development tools, techniques, methodologies, to make software development more agile, done in smaller, reusable units, more distributed, more iterative, with ever-shortening release cycles.

Companies have spent billions, in fact, on buying platforms to enable SOA, BPM, ESB, and legacy modernization approaches. It created a new problem however... development is getting faster, but the time and cost savings is more than eaten up by QA and maintenance -- and the overall release timeline is getting longer. This imbalance has continued to grow, and organizations can not afford to keep going down this path.

To resolve it, you have to focus on test AND delivery, to wit: How do I optimize the larger lifecycle to keep up with Complexity and Change in my software? We can't afford the support nightmare of software failures in production, but if we throw resources and infrastructure at testing to keep up with all the changes, our costs and timelines, will balloon.

This is why companies are turning to Service Virtualization as a way to alleviate the huge cost of having a valid system environment available for testing, validation and performance purposes. We are thankful to be here, working to solve this problem, at a time of so much change and complexity.

Hear what some other musing friends feel thankful for on the eBizQ forum here. I personally have also been thankful to see less top 10 predictions, and more things to be thankful for, as we finally head out of what has been a tough decade for many businesses. Here's to a very successful 10's!

iTKO Webinar Dec. 15th with TCS: Modernizing Application Quality

Here's a little reminder to stop by and register for next week's webinar with iTKO and TCS, titled "Leveraging Modern Software Quality to Prevent Cost and Schedule Overruns" - running December 15, 2009 at 1:00PM EST. This session will feature Siva Ganesan, the Global head of Assurance Services of TCS, and iTKO founder/Chief Geek John Michelsen.

A sneak peek into this production: a lot of new thinking appears in the content. TCS has one of the most mature software testing practices around, but this webinar focuses firmly on the future. Automation techniques, virtualization of constraints and a rapid, iterative approach are needed to tackle the kinds of advanced, distributed, heterogeneous architectures we need to test.

Sign up for the webinar here: http://www.itko.com/resources/webinar_tcs_dec2009.jsp. If you miss the time, we'll send you an archive link later.

Thoughts from Gartner AADI 2009 Summit - SOA's still on.

I recently returned from the Gartner AADI conference in Las Vegas, and had the chance to enjoy dozens of good conversations with IT execs who were there primarily to explore strategies for the coming year. Some thoughts from the conference and sessions I was able to catch:

• Budget optimism... Overall it seemed that there was a guarded optimism for re-invigorated architecture and integration projects and budgets in 2010, many people said they were part of a new group or new reporting structure specifically tasked with defining a strategy.
• SOA Won't Die - in fact any lead architect or CIO I caught up with says they are quietly going about service-orientation and getting real value from it, even if it's not sexy anymore. After the age of boundless service proliferation earlier in the decade, it seems that much of the talk is now about authority - who owns and manages these services, and how are they compensated for doing so. Recently a lot of the "SOA elite" posted some good discussion on this topic (check out this eBizQ SOA forum here).
• Heterogeneity is king. The optimism for integration is tempered by a big dose of skepticism about "one stop shop" vendor claims - even more so than you normally hear from the analysts. Companies are dealing with the realities of multiple acquired systems from different vendors, and looking for ways to modernize their applications.
• People understand the distinction of service virtualization. Another pleasant surprise was the understanding shown for hardware/network virtualization vs. the practice of Service or behavioral virtualization of constrained assets that simply can't be captured or dropped on a VM. I believe the analyst community has talked to application layer customers about how these assets can be brought to bear earlier into the lifecycle, even if this practice doesn't exactly fit under defined research fields like software quality, app dev, virtualization and IT ops.
• Cloud Computing still uncommon in large-scale enterprises - There was a great deal of content about Cloud-based approaches at the summit, and it is certainly important to get some forward insight. In practical terms however I did not see these $500M+ company IT execs mention Cloud in their basket of must-do items for 2010, other than a notable exception of specifically wanting trading partners to use the Cloud more to ease cost and access issues. (This reminds me of public transportation, "it would be great if everyone else would do it to free up the road...") Certainly a lot of curiosity and predictions around this. I am sure at a less enterprise software heavy conference you would see more cloud practitioners and this will continue to grow.

In any case it was a productive time at Caesar's, and we will discuss some topics we touched on this week at a later time.