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

Those Guys need LISA!

I frequently joke with my team about finding our next customers in major business publications. Every time I read a headline like the following, I immediately think: “Those guys need LISA!"

Yahoo Tech News: "Apple, AT&T sites buckle as iPhone 4 pre-orders begin"

The fact is, all the agile developers, functional testers and load testing servers they can fire up are not going to help them here.  This is NOT a load testing issue, it’s a virtualization of services issue!

If we met the guys working on all this critical stuff, you would certainly not hear that companies like Apple or AT&T don’t have enough money to buy servers.  In fact, many major companies actually tell me that they have more servers registered in their asset tracking system than they have employees!  These guys will be no different...

So how could these teams have used LISA to prevent this conundrum?

1. Service Virtualize each others' pieces of functionality that contribute to the site experience, so that each team can develop and functionally test their bits, without having to wait for the system to come together later, during integration.
2. Service Virtualize the dependent systems (inventory, customer ordering, account and number provisioning, etc.) so that performance tests at high levels can be performed ahead of time, and each service can size and qualify their environment for the load expected when it goes live.

Some day in the future, they will even want to have intelligent ways to fail over in production during peak load hours, but let's not put the cart before the horse. One of my banking customers puts it eloquently when he tells his component teams to reach a certain performance level on their own: "If your app isn't performing fast enough in your own virtual environment, why should you bother giving it to me to test in my environment?"

OK I’ll stop rambling.  Now somebody let me know when the coast is clear, so I can order my next phone ...  ;)

Addressing a Lack of Capacity in the Performance Lab - Webinar 6/24

If there ever was an easy reason to adopt Service Virtualization techniques, it would be the performance lab. We are seeing customers reckoning with this problem over and over: highly skilled performance testers, with expensive lab infrastructure and software, WAITING around to access needed resources to do their job and ensure expected software performance levels.

In a couple weeks we are doing a big webinar on IT Briefcase with our partners Accenture: "Addressing a Lack of Capacity: Virtualizing the Performance Lab for Optimal Results."

The free session is June 24, 2010 1:00 - 2:00 pm, Central Time (2-3PM Eastern)

I am presenting with Accenture Partner Scott Gilliland, who runs the Global Performance Engineering practice for the firm, with experts who have already implemented these tactics to some incredible results at our joint customer sites - we are talking increasing the amount of performance testing done to go well beyond 6-Sigma reliability, at less 25% of the existing labor and infrastructure cost.

Today's applications are more distributed and complex than ever - and that makes for an entirely new economy around needing high performance that can't be ignored. Fail to perform, and you will certainly lose customers. Scott will expertly describe the financial reasons for eliminating constraints from performance testing.

What's interesting to note is that we usually find that performance labs are acutely aware they have idle time waiting for assets to run their load tests against, and wasted effort on coding simulations. But they don't know what these inefficiencies actually cost the business - until now.

Short of building a copy of the whole enterprise's software infrastructure for each test lab (which can cost millions for a typical F1000 enterprise), and manually coding all of the dependencies (such as mainframes owned by other divisions or partners, SaaS providers, Cloud-based services) needed to respond to the performance tests, there is another way to achieve a realistic environment that is truly elastic.

Service Virtualization captures and creates a realistic, highly scalable and responsive version of virtually any system the Performance Lab needs to connect to, using whatever tools they currently use for load testing - whether that is HP Performance Center (LoadRunner), IBM Rational platforms, Micro Focus' Segue tools, or some of our own system-wide or Web 2.0 test & validation apps.

These virtual services become assets that look and act exactly like the real thing - but they are very lightweight, low cost simulations, with very stable data scenarios, adjustable or variable response times, and the ability to be ready for reuse 24/7 at a moment's notice. The resulting virtual performance lab allows these software to be continuously performance tested at a component level, ensuring that when the pieces come together, they exceed SLA expectations.

Let's define a goal together: No more constraints on capacity in the performance lab. Hope you join us June 24 and find out how to get there.

News Today: iTKO LISA, IBM Rational, and an Open Services Future

We are here at IBM Rational's major Innovate 2010 conference talking to customers about how they can support the application lifecycle with approaches built for today's distributed, Cloud-based architectures.

A good piece of official news came out today: "iTKO Announces Integration of LISA with IBM Rational Software" is about our further integration with IBM's Rational software suite and Jazz development platform, and continued collaboration with their far-reaching ecosystem of application developers and architects.

The new functionality discussed in the release is only part of what we are presenting this week at the IBM Innovate conference (if you are there, come see us at Booth J in the Cloud Zone). Specific use cases include:

• Create RTC work items or ClearQuest defects out of LISA tests with detailed, multi-tier trace information included
• Auto-discover and auto-generate Virtual Data Sets, Regressions, and Virtual Services for constraint-free, collaborative defect resolution and transparency across services
• LISA integrates with Rational Quality Manager (RQM) built on the Jazz platform to manage validation in ALM processes
• Supports collaboration initiatives including the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC), by providing better clarity into adherence to compositional and integration standards.

Today's news comes after several months of working with IBM at customer sites to better eliminate the constraints of unavailable or incomplete systems through a joint solution we call Application Virtualization. While LISA has been "Ready for Rational" for a long time, this latest integration volley represents some significant net-new functionality for customers.