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

Cloud Chaos for App Dev: Who Should Manage the Change?

We see a lot of enterprise IT teams saying "this year is the year we will take charge of our app dev environments and move them to Cloud."  Indeed, Cloud should empower these dev and test teams, and ease the time and expense of standard lab provisioning practices greatly. We have often said that the best, first application of Cloud is for software development itself.

But what happens if different teams select "Hybrid Cloud" approaches? Or, even scarier, what if the company migrates or evolves their overall Cloud strategy over time, as some of the first generation Virtual Lab Management (VLM) offerings are already being replaced by newer vendors and systems?

What this has done is create a new kind of Cloud Chaos for software development labs: one where you might have each software team spending time configuring and working with various Cloud lab provisioning approaches, instead of focusing on developing and testing functionality that delivers value for the business.

One major energy customer we worked with literally sent 600 developers and testers to Lab Manager training to learn how to provision VM systems - only to find that the next quarter, the IT operations group selected new Cloud infrastructure to replace that system!

We recommend an approach that does not dictate a particular Cloud hosting, lab server virtualization or management platform to give teams access to their software devtest environments - changing the "many to many" issue to a "one to many" capability.

By using LISA's DevTest Cloud Manager (DCM) technology, a company can centralize the provisioning of all Cloud environments through one system, so multiple development teams can get access to all the labs they need - including the VLMs that deliver both server VMs and Virtual Services to simulate off-cloud or "big data" dependencies that cannot be conventionally replicated.

The DCM approach mitigates the consequences of change, and eliminates the need for development and testing teams to know exactly where, or how their Cloud environments are hosted and managed.

End dev and test consumers make a request to LISA DCM and instantly stand up a lab environment that is ready to go, with the systems, test data setups, and virtual services needed for distributed enterprise software development. They no longer need to focus on whether their environment is hosted in a Private cloud with CA's AppLogic, run as a Hybrid Cloud with AutoSuite or IBM solutions, or whether that capacity for a big Performance Test lab gets pushed out to Amazon or MS Azure and managed using VMware tools.

The main point of agile development and testing in the Cloud is to allow teams to focus on high-value activities -- meaning they are building and assuring software that meets business needs, instead of managing and setting up environments. The trend for all companies to move more software functionality to the Cloud will only continue. Let's embrace this high rate of change and increasingly heterogeneous future without sacrificing the productivity of software development.

We appreciate your questions and feedback on Cloud development and testing practices. Look for more articles from ITKO on this topic soon.

 

Fast, Cheap & Good? Virtually Breaking the Limits of Software Development

We had a well-attended ITKO webinar with analyst firm voke on Lifecycle Virtualization (see an archive here) with almost 200 live attendees yesterday - clearly a lot of interest in these new developments, and thanks to all who attended.

In the first half, voke's Theresa Lanowitz described her research on Lifecycle Virtualization (LV) as an emerging technology space that encompasses several major vendors and niche players in Service Virtualization, virtual lab management (VLM), cloud platforms, network and device virtualization. She predicts an LV market will come to fruition and demonstrate value for IT by 2013 -- not so far off for something so new. But then again, remember how recently Cloud was a new concept?

As everyone knows by now, you can't simply cost-cut your way to differentiation and leadership in these competitive times. Hardware and desktop virtualization made a big one-time impact on IT costs by reducing the number of Intel boxes, but now what? Is there opportunity for another field of Virtualization that could be focused around meeting customer needs?

For most industries today, your ability to successfully deliver software is your ability to deliver business value for customers. Or, as Theresa put it more simply: "Software IS the business." Software touches everything, from sales, to manufacturing and delivery, to back end accounting and strategic planning. The ripped-from-the-headlines software failures she mentioned yesterday in banks, telcos, retail are moribund, and making headlines every day.

A couple of the more pointed questions we got during the webinar really made me think about how far we've come since the limits of the Rule of 3 in software development:

"Fast, Good, or Cheap Software:
-- You can't have all 3!"

In fact, simply making strides against this rule was a main goal of ITKO's in the very early days (around 2003-2006) when we were selling quality assurance software for complex architectures like J2EE and SOA. Hey it's not cheap to get skilled programmers and testers for these applications, so do automated component testing earlier, save some time and money and avoid costly project failures. There was just one missing piece though: How could we move this lifecycle forward faster as software became more and more distributed, while not having access or control over so many systems we need?

Service Virtualization is already becoming a proven and essential practice, with solutions from leading vendors -- and it will fundamentally reset the value equation of software development. Call SV part of Lifecycle Virtualization if you like, but it definitely fits the bill of replacing physical and manually copied development infrastructure with automated, virtual infrastructure.

This new virtual environment, whether on-premise or in the Cloud, is flexible enough to allow software development and testing activities to happen in parallel, at much lower cost and extreme efficiency. Yes we can now do Better, Faster, Cheaper - all of which enable the enterprise to deliver software that perfectly meets customer needs.

Thanks for your questions yesterday, and we invite you to recommend yesterday's webinar archive replay now on our site, and download a complimentary licensed copy of voke's latest Market Snapshot overview on Lifecycle Virtualization if you have a colleague who might benefit from this info.

Next up on the ITKO Blog: Who Manages Cloud Chaos??

Webinar 1/18: What is the Lifecycle Virtualization Market, and Why Service Virtualization Matters

You've seen a rapid barrage of market news in just the last 12 months about Service Virtualization (or SV) technology lately. CA buys ITKO for LISA's Service Virtualization capabilities, and many more acquisitions and announcements from major players in this space happening. Why now?

We've been talking about this practice of SV for almost 5 years now at ITKO, but clearly all these companies don't arrive at these conclusions unless there is a market movement afoot with customers. Indeed, Service Virtualization is part of a bigger shift toward more agile development using a new form of virtualization in shared environments such as private and public DevTest Clouds that will allow increased parallel development, with on-demand capacity for performance and earlier regression testing, thereby speeding up the overall application development lifecycle.

One analyst we respect on these matters, Theresa Lanowitz of voke, has a term for this new space that floats above the conventional requirements, development and test tools of the ALM portfolio - she calls it "Lifecycle Virtualization."

Here's a chance to learn about Lifecycle Virtualization and this new generation of technology encompassing Service Virtualization capabilities, and much more. Join Theresa and ITKO/CA "Chief Geek" and founder John Michelsen for this live webinar Wednesday, Jan. 18th:

Webinar: Lifecycle Virtualization - A New Practice of Optimizing Application Development, featuring voke and ITKO

January 18, 2012 1:00pm-2:00pm Central

Theresa has been talking to both end customers and software vendors in this space for many years as an IT analyst following emerging trends in application development. Here's her take on Lifecycle Virtualization from her latest blog "Part of An Overall Lifecycle Virtualization Solution":

"Lifecycle virtualization is defined as the use of technologies such as virtual lab management, service virtualization, defect virtualization, device virtualization, virtualized cloud platforms, etc, to enhance the application or product lifecycle through reducing defects, lowering costs, speeding time-to-market, and increasing customer satisfaction."

We hope you attend this webinar and find out how the application development industry is evolving to meet the difficult challenges of complex, interconnected systems and increasing customer demands for high performance, flawless service. Call it Service Virtualization, Lifecycle Virtualization, or whatever you like -- customers are realizing the value of much faster delivery with less risk today, while saving millions in infrastructure costs.

Also as a primer, we suggest you pick up the latest voke Research Market Overview paper on Lifecycle Virtualization (available for a limited time) which provides a good Overview of this new technology space.

ITKO retrospective with John & Shridhar in D Magazine

ITKO's own John Michelsen and Shridhar Mittal recently appeared at a Dallas-area business forum to share their unique experience of building a little private software firm into a global software player, and writer Glenn Hunter from D Magazine's CEO business publication was there. Read this interesting personality piece here:

D CEO Magazine: The Triumph of LISA
iTKO scores with a revolutionary software product, thanks to the geek who invented it and a CEO who knew how to grow.

It has been an incredible ride -  less than 6 years from initial funding to reshaping the application development market with Service Virtualization innovations, and then becoming a strategic part of a leading software company like CA Technologies. But this story is far from over...

[link:] http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/D_CEO/2012/January_February/iTKO_the_Triumph_of_Lisa_Software.aspx