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

High-Velocity Healthcare Application Webinar - CA LISA and CA APM

We're looking forward to an upcoming webinar featuring some of the most compelling service virtualization customer stories we've encountered in the Healthcare (insurance, medical and government sector) industry.

As the major players and Payers in healthcare move toward new regulations and Federal and state exchanges, the impact on their software development and IT Operations efforts will be huge. How can these two teams within each enterprise work together more closely, and become Agile enough in delivering new functionality to make it through the challenges they will face over the coming year?

Join Harris Corporation's Mark Waterloo, and hear how he's part of a performance and agility transformation using SV and APM together at one of the world's largest health organizations. And stay for frequent CA community contributors Jason English and Ken Ahrens talking about how customers can develop, test and release software faster, and do so with better performance than conventional methods using CA LISA Service Virtualization along with real feedback from leading Application Performance Management suites like CA APM.

Webinar: High-Velocity Healthcare Application Delivery with Service Virtualization and APM

Run Time: Thursday, Feb. 28. 1:00PM - 2:00PM Eastern

Free sign up: http://servicevirtualization.com/events/ca-healthcare-webinar-high-velocity-with-ca-lisa-and-ca-apm

Bring your questions, and join the ServiceVirtualization.com community of IT and business professionals interested in advancing SV practices.

ServiceVirtualization.Com Webinar Preview with Gartner, CA (ITKO), Burt

Looking for non-vendor specific best practices advice and commentary from peer companies that have tried and learned how to succeed (or fail) at Service Virtualization? There's a community site coming up that will help professional of all companies share valuable lessons on how to best employ this transformational technology as an everyday practice to make application development better, faster and cheaper.

 

Hear John discuss why the new ServiceVirtualization.Com community is happening and join him at the upcoming webinar:

Webinar: Parallel Development with Service Virtualization
with Gartner, ITKO (CA) content on http://www.servicevirtualization.com.

Global run times:

• May 16, 2012 | 1:00PM Central US - North America
• May 17, 2012 | 1:00PM AEST (GMT +10:00) Asia/Pacific
• May 17, 2012 | 10:00AM GMT Europe/UK

The first cool thing happening on this new site is an upcoming webinar featuring:

• Gartner research director Tom Murphy discussing the current state of Parallel Development given an increasing amount of complexity and change in today's apps that inhibits software teams best attempts at Agile.
• ITKO founder / CA distinguished engineer John Michelsen talking about the advance of Service Virtualization practices for faster time-to-market by replacing production-style software labs with virtual service environments
• Burt Klein, customer advocate for ServiceVirtualization.com and one of the first leaders of Service Virtualization practices as a former SVP of Performance and Resiliency at a top 5 global bank, discusses how his teams drastically shortened release cycles while improving performance by "shifting quality left" at integration testing - using service virtualization to remove as much as $60M or more of infrastructure cost.

We'll be on the community. So will our customers and partners. And so will other software companies. Why are we all there? Service Virtualization is not just software you buy, it is fundamentally something you do.

 

 

 

Putting Service Virtualization to Work takes People, Process, THEN Technology

The last month has been extremely fun here at CA's ITKO campus in Plano, Texas - with a lot of fresh new faces from around the world, including many peers from our favorite technology companies (and competitors) participating in orientation.

When you join an enterprise software company, you fully expect to get a massive dose of product information. But that isn't the whole story - as focusing on the Delivery aspect of our solutions is just as critical as any feature/function talks about LISA software. It's still "People, Process, Technology" in that order for a reason, right?

In our engagements we've found certain organizational decisions that dramatically impact the value a company receives from their software. Without getting into the finer points of ITKO's own value assessment and delivery process - let's take a look at some examples of these.

1. Set value goals for the first Service Virtualization project up front. While it is tempting for a team to kick off the install ASAP and start virtualizing some annoying constraints, don't skip the value goals. The rest of the organization is watching, and will often meter their expectations of SV based on the success of that first project. Setting a goal and measuring the value from the beginning enables your organization to support future projects with confidence.

2. Get the business to buy in, not just IT. While successful Service Virtualization initiatives offer huge efficiency benefits to the IT group, they usually start with executive sponsorship and an alignment to real, customer-facing business objectives. Time-to-Market usually leads the pack here -- because if a business can depend on delivering a critical new product or service to customers 30-50% faster, without fail, the revenue and cost benefits will certainly follow.

3. Don't "give a fool a tool." Sounds like something our favorite character actor Mr. T would say, but he would probably agree that just handing software licenses to a team of developers or testers (even if they are very smart) and expecting them to "figure it out" will not cut it. Even if the software itself is quite intuitive, it must handle very complex tasks. Modeling today's distributed heterogeneous application environments with Service Virtualization does take  planning and training, so that over time the practice can be grown as a core competency of the organization.

4. Expect growing pains. A Service Virtualization implementation should never force your teams to disrupt their development process tools of choice, nor "rip and replace" existing integration and business applications. However, once the ability to "virtualize everything" becomes understood, it will cause ripples throughout the organization.

SV will certainly cause a change in mindset, and raise the bar for delivering faster releases with higher quality. The most highly valued teams will thrive by learning new skills, such as identifying and replacing external constraints, collaborating with more distributed teams to resolve issues and dependencies, and leveraging virtual services for parallel development.

These are just a few adoption trends we've noticed in the field. At ITKO we have a proven strategic delivery practice and roadmap for CA LISA Service Virtualization implementation and rollout, at many of the world's largest enterprises, working alongside leading Services partners. In the "New Virtual" world of Service Virtualization-based software labs, a strong methodology backed by experienced service delivery teams are the key to realizing lasting customer success.

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??

Mock & Roll will Never Die

If you already have built a "mock system" in order to advance development, why would you need something better? I recently had a good conversation with our East architecture lead Ken Ahrens (see more of his work here) after a great CA World event for ITKO was winding down in Las Vegas. We had a lot of questions in our sessions about the development shop that has already "rolled their own" system of stubs and mocks - and what that meant for Service Virtualization practices.

When a company says they already have a mock system, we normally view that as a very positive sign - and tell them as much.  Often we have to convince customers that incomplete and unavailable systems are development problems that need to be solved, before we can even talk about the idea of Service Virtualization capabilities. Whereas the customer with a mock system already understands this is a real problem that needs to be solved.

I usually comment at this point about how we’ve replaced several mock systems at other customers (banks, utilities, telcos, etc...) with LISA's service virtualization. SV really is the productization of the stub and mock space, with enough sophistication to support more complex logic and performance scenarios. Similar to how you wouldn’t write your own database nowadays, it doesn’t make sense to build your own mock system when there is an industry standard solution for this available.

Some questions that usually come up:

• Does your mock system meet 100% of your needs and is it used on every single project?
• How expensive is the mock system to build and maintain?
• How fast do you need new mock services built, and are they ready on time?

If a development shop is mocking a single binary transaction -- that is a simple enough problem to solve with a bit of code. But as soon as multiple systems talk to each other, and multiple business scenarios need to be validated - the manual stub approach quickly starts to trip over its own weight, and the process of mocking and massaging test data and environments can drastically slow down delivery.

On one recent visit to an East coast utility, the customer team decided that LISA began to win (from a cost perspective) after only 10 rather finite services were mocked.  One of our favorite banks established a "center of excellence" for enabling teams with Service Virtualization instead of stubs, and measured a full return in about 6 months - then did something even more interesting by rapidly fixing issues found in production by virtualizing production behavior into the dev environment.  A successful customer like this doesn't just buy software, they take the adoption of the practice seriously - and it's usually the guys who have experienced the pain of rolling their own mocks that see the potential benefits the fastest.

In short – if you already do mock services we think it’s a good thing, so tell us about your story!

 

Giving Caesar His Due at Gartner AADI 2011- New Agile and Composite Dev Reports Available

We're heading to Las Vegas again this week to Caesars Palace - at the Gartner AADI (Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit) 2011 where we are appearing as a Platinum Sponsor, and joining our colleagues from CA Technologies to talk about the ties between ensuring application performance and increasing the agility of application development.

This is the topic of our latest joint Newsletter with Gartner that just came out today (complimentary view/download):

ITKO Insights, with Gartner Research, Issue 2 -
Winter 2011 - Ensuring Agile Composite Application Development (Report expired.)


This issue features a new report called "The Three C's of Agile" from two Gartner analysts that cover the App Dev space very thoroughly, David Norton and Tom Murphy. Get your copy of this research here, as well as a couple new papers and articles from ITKO providing further insight into Enterprise Agile and Service Virtualization best practices.

That's one of the biggest themes we're hearing from end customers as they work with the leading analyst firms - "Enterprise Agile" is the next big thing, and it's coming to fruition now. We all know IT budgets have been cut - but today's enterprise cannot cut its way to profitability in an uber-competitive market. Faster delivery of new services that customers demand requires an extremely strong plan for developing and delivery quality to market at a much greater pace.

If you are going to Gartner AADI, please stop by the ITKO booth at the Solution Expo, and reserve some time for our Session on Tuesday with our LISA product manager Chris Kraus: ""Optimizing the Application Lifecycle with Agile Collaboration and Cloud DevTest Labs" Tuesday, November 29, 3:30-4:30 PM, Octavius 16. 

To successfully deliver critical customer-facing services faster, enterprises must first leverage Cloud to optimize software lifecycles. As companies move applications to Cloud, they find these environments intertwined with dependency constraints on other off-cloud systems, limiting the elasticity and overall usefulness of Cloud environments. This session discusses how multiple software teams increase agility and collaboration using virtual infrastructure in DevTest clouds. Time-to-market is accelerated when lab infrastructure and data scenarios are in place on-demand, enabling teams to “shift quality left” and eliminate issues early.

 

 

 

Get the voke Market Snapshot on Lifecycle Virtualization

At CA World today hearing from voke analyst Theresa Lanowitz introducing her latest independent research on the practice of Lifecycle Virtualization. Theresa defines this as a new space that encompasses the existing concepts of Virtual Lab Management, coupled with newer capabilities such as Service Virtualization, Device and Network virtualization that eliminate constraints and costs from software development tasks and enable faster time-to-market.

We've licensed this new report for a limited time, and you can download it here: voke Market Snapshot report: Lifecycle Virtualization (.PDF download, 313K)

The report is especially interesting because it is the first document we've seen that defines a new space of virtualization as it enables faster, unconstrained development and test of today's complex, highly distributed applications. Lifecycle Virtualization encompasses many of the new technologies and practices that enable development environments to work beyond the existing, well-known definition of Application Lifecycle Management (or ALM).

Here's an overview of the research from voke's press release:

The report highlights the importance of Lifecycle Virtualization, which leverages virtualization technologies for development and QA teams to enhance the application or product lifecycle. Alongside desktop and server virtualization, lifecycle virtualization serves as the third pillar in a truly virtual environment. In fact, Lanowitz believes lifecycle virtualization has the power and potential to deliver more impact to the market than both server and desktop virtualization, by finally solving age-old and classic challenges of software development and delivery.

Lifecycle virtualization includes the following solutions such as virtual lab management (VLM), virtualized cloud platforms, service virtualization, defect virtualization, and device virtualization.

We hope you find the free report useful in your planning and research, and look for more articles with voke as this firm continues to survey customers employing this new technology and the practices around it.

CA World Vision Award Winner – 5 Questions with First Data’s Laura Miller

Here at the CA World 2011 conference, the Agility Made Possible Customer awards were just announced, and First Data Corporation won the Vision Award for excellence in Service Assurance practices for their groundbreaking use of CA LISA to eliminate constraints and establish a Performance Testing Center of Excellence.

Read the press release here: “CA Technologies 2011 Agility Made Possible Awards Honors Customers’ Successes in IT Management and Security”

We have seen this company really take to heart the practice of delivering product to market faster using Service Virtualization to eliminate access constraints and setup time.

I recently had a chance to have 5 questions with Laura Miller, VP of Global Product Development at First Data, about her company’s journey using LISA to optimize performance and deliver product faster.

What is the project that brought on your team’s use of LISA?

We needed to performance test and rearchitect two of our front end financial institution products that both business and end clients will use in their own sites and call centers. It was critical that we have real-time levels of performance, or sub-second response times built in from the ground up. Our consulting partners helped us design a solution, and they recommended leveraging LISA to achieve the testing we needed.

Much of this Vision award is about finding new ways to overcome traditional constraints on software development. How has your group done this?

I like the fact that LISA really takes away traditional constraints. In the old days we would have had to build out the entire infrastructure, even if it was a smaller version of it. Or we would have had to write our own stubs. With LISA we were able to virtualize the mainframes and it took no time at all – it only took us two weeks to get a good representation running.

Also we wanted 24/7 testing, and we often have teams offshore testing at any time of day. With LISA I didn’t have any back-end constraint to moving forward. Not only were we able to get it set up quickly, but we were able to finish testing quickly, and therefore get our product out the door faster.

How important is time to market in your industry and what can IT do to accelerate it?

I don’t think there’s a market today where speed-to-market isn’t important. Look at Apple, FedEx and what they do. Obviously it is critical. For us it is all about the ability to deliver faster, and with higher quality, while reducing our setup time and not having to build new architecture. The setup and configuration of time of LISA also went very quickly as we got skilled people on the job.

The one thing we all know is that testing always gets short-changed. Timelines always get reduced, and that’s not changing. Being able to test 24/7, and not have downtime, really allowed us to push our application and know it would perform.

Behind any successful implementation or modernization there are usually multiple teams that need to get involved – has collaboration improved?

In our organization, collaboration was key on this. Before this initiative, we didn’t have a dedicated performance team in our Testing Center of Excellence, so we had to collaborate and bring in stakeholders from capacity planning, development, infrastructure teams, as well as functional testing and other groups. It was the first time we really brought all these groups together.

Our systems have grown internally and incrementally, over time. It used to not be as critical to worry about this because most apps were mainframe-based. Now these systems have become a dependency for us and even the business side is looking to us to confirm that we meet our client requirements.

What has it been like working with ITKO, now a CA Technologies company?

We’re very excited as a team to win the CA World Vision award this year. We were already CA customers and we have almost every tool they make, including APM, Clarity, and many other solutions. We are working on the next projects of performance testing and automation. 

I have always been pleased with ITKO and what they do with innovation, collaboration with clients and their drive to constantly make LISA a product that makes our lives better. A month ago I met with ITKO leadership and some other customers, and they wanted to hear our input on where they should invest more development time and what they could do better. That’s a very unique culture for a software company. We expect that level of passion and commitment to improve the product from the people who made LISA.

LISA on the Map at CA World - Optimize IT Change and Operations

Less than a week until CA World 2011 in Vegas Nov. 13-16, and ITKO's first-ever appearance there (as a CA company) is gearing up to have quite a lot to offer attendees of this premier IT event - many of whom may not be familiar with how much ITKO can help IT Operations, Environments and Performance Management teams do their jobs, outside of LISA's better-known role in enterprise software virtualization and development solutions.

Take a look at this little handout map we are bringing - you can hear from ITKO experts at almost every moment of CA World, starting with the Service Assurance General Session on Monday. ITKO engineers, LISA customers and partners will be presenting on best practices for Service Virtualization, continuous testing, building Cloud-based DevTest environments, and more.

Also, check out some more interesting content featuring ITKO with CA Technologies solutions at CAWorld 2011:

1. Sessions featuring CA Service Assurance (Introscope/Wily/NetQoS) and LISA - plays twice: AE007SR: Faster Time-to-Market for Critical Business Services with CA APM and CA LISA – Tuesday, 11/15, 1:15 – 2:15PM, and Wed., 11/16, 2:45 – 3:45, Lagoon H
2. ERwin's Data Modeling and the Application Lifecycle: Monday, 2:45PM. What are the best practices for understanding data dependencies and reduce risk from software design, through development and testing? Features content about ERwin and LISA. CA's Donna Burbank presents.
3. Service Assurance and CA LISA in the Expo: See how to use Service Virtualization for Performance Optimization, and find out about faster Break/Fix capabilities using CA's Application Performance Management and LISA's defect resolution features together.

So - besides catching ITKO's track for optimizing the application lifecycle, look around next week - there are plenty of opportunities to learn new techniques for increasing agility at CA World.

A High-Velocity Customer Event Retrospective

This last weekend we had an excellent time hosting some select customers for the Bank of America 500 race in Charlotte, NC. We got an up-close perspective of the race, with access to some really cool behind the scenes areas inside and outside the track, meeting some of the top drivers and seeing how their crews are tuning and optimizing the cars for performance. Here's a quick video from the event:

 

But this was not an all-play weekend, we also dedicated some time to discussing how to optimize application lifecycles for better performance and higher-speed delivery with these key customers.  We outlined some areas of the company and product in order to find the best use of our resources to help our customers finish first.

Three trends that really seemed to emerge:

• Companies are thinking about Cloud more than ever, but they are starting with Private Clouds for development and testing purposes and are mostly moving non-business related applications to public clouds.
• Customers are shifting quality left by reorganizing labor pools to become more efficient.  Most of the customers represented are bringing more technical and engineering resources into managing their quality as the lines between application development and quality continue to blur.
• Test Data Management continues to haunt all of the customers represented.  As applications break apart and are released and maintained with separate lifecycles, the variables in the data scenarios explode. Methods for capturing and virtualizing "just the data you need" became an interesting point of discussion.

Great commentary at the event regarding practices and procedures - here's some of the best quotes:

• A banking customer said: "I’ll take integrated solutions over best of breed every time."
• Another banking customer stated: “There are so many data scenarios associated with credit cards that you can’t count them.”
• One customer stated regarding reorganizations:  “My group has been in 6 different reporting structures in 5 years, and we still continue to perform the same single function.”

All this means that there is more pressure than ever on these teams to deliver more functionality, faster, against an ever-increasing level of complexity. Among many of the customers of LISA there is also a lot of synergy with what CA is doing within their infrastructure and applications side of the house - so ITKO becoming a CA company has been met with a lot of enthusiasm.

A fun aside, ITKO also now the unofficial sponsor of "Couchman" (Approximately 00:29 in the video) if you are ever looking to relax in style at one of these events! For some more commentary on the event, our own marketer arranging the ground @scottkingtx posted some feedback on his own blog. Great event!

"iqnite 2011" - That's Australian for Agile Development & Cloud Testing Oct 5-6

We're sponsors of an excellent upcoming event in Sydney, Australia this October 5-6 - iqnite, the Software Testing Summit.

We are excited to see many of our new customers present and speaking about using Virtual Service environments to get products to market with higher quality, and eliminating the constraints testers face in getting access to a valid, ready-to-run software lab with far less labor and infrastructure cost.

Our founder and "Chief Geek," John Michelsen will be presenting a session:

Thursday, Oct 6, 2:15PM: "Shifting Quality Left with Agile Collaboration and Cloud DevTest Labs"

To successfully build and release critical new customer-facing services faster, you need to think of Cloud as more than just another hosting option. As companies deploy Dev and Test Clouds, they quickly realize that cloud environments remain intertwined with dependency constraints on other "off cloud" systems in the enterprise. If not addressed, these constraints effectively limit the elasticity, flexibility, and overall usefulness of Dev and Test Cloud environments. This session will discuss how multiple teams can increase their agility and collaborate more effectively by leveraging virtual infrastructure in DevTest clouds. Time to market is accelerated when the lab infrastructure and data scenarios are in place on-demand, enabling you to “shift quality left” and test much earlier in the software lifecycle.

The last 2 years have seen an incredible amount of LISA activity from the Australia/New Zealand IT community, especially in fully embracing the concepts of Service Virtualization and DevTest Cloud for most of the major Banking and Telco enterprises there. It's almost as if the whole continent waited for composite application architecture methods to sort themselves out before adopting service-orientation, then leapfrogged their global IT counterparts by moving straight into doing that distributed development and testing in elastic, on-demand Cloud labs.

Discount Registration Offer: As premium sponsors of this highly anticipated event, we can offer you and your colleagues $300 off a standard two day conference pass, or $100 off a one day conference pass. Be sure to use the promotion code "oziqnitekjross" when booking to secure this special price.

The show has keynotes from Google, Microsoft and Commonwealth Bank. The level of customer experience in solving some of the most difficult QA issues in the Cloud at this show looks great. Bring your questions for us, and hope to see you there!

Helping a Telco Run Faster with Service Virtualization

Just got a really great note from one of our lead consultants in the field at a top US Telco provider. One of their major business groups that handles premium mobile content such as  search, games and entertainment, needed to go live with a new customer-facing system.

The highlights? Deployment had zero defects at launch and resulted in more than $3 million in software cost savings for 2011, while saving 4-5 weeks of expected cycle time.

The company had a driving reason to virtualize services, as they had a multi-million dollar upgrade planned for their delivery platform, and with it, a wash of additional licensing and maintenance expenditures.  Many of these costs would be "non value add" services and labor - duplicate licenses, time spent replicating over application servers and customer databases, all to provide an environment for them to use in pre-production to develop and test each new app against.

To top it off, the timeframe was extremely limited - the need for the above implementation was identified in March and the system was due in June this year! The app dev team chose to head off this requirement by implementing Service Virtualization models using LISA. If they failed, they would have been up the proverbial creek without an environment.

Fortunately, they were able to install and implement all of the needed virtual services and launch the new environment in less than 4 months - quite a difference from a process they had never before completed in less than a year. Then, the presence of completed, 24/7 available virtual labs allowed the development team to "shift quality left" and start collaborating immediately and shave 4-5 weeks off their expected customer services release timeline.

Anyway, we love hearing about teams that put Service Virtualization on the line to realize efficiencies and improved quality like this. Kudos!

New Paper: What Should a Service Virtualization Solution Do?

More than four years ago, we released the first version of LISA's Service Virtualization capabilities because we saw a fundamental roadblock occurring at almost every one of our enterprise customers. Sure, they were more efficiently automating functional, regression and performance testing with LISA, but inevitably, teams would complain that they still weren't becoming as "Agile" as they hoped. They were losing productivity due to constraints brought on by other parties they were connected to: partners and other dev teams that either didn't complete their delivery yet, or limited access to their systems.

This is why I'm excited to introduce this new paper I wrote for our 4-part joint IT Thought Leaders Whitepaper Series with our partners at Infosys:

Key Capabilities of a Service Virtualization Solution (Download PDF)
Eliminating Software Development and Testing Constraints by Virtualizing Away Dependencies in the Environment

We have to face the fact that no development team can build and test software in isolation anymore, using repurposed client-server tools. Software lifecycles are becoming increasingly composite and service-based, while an increasing number of smaller, agile teams created interdependencies that must be addressed with a new kind of virtualization - something we called Service Virtualization: the simulation of constrained or unavailable systems for continuous availability throughout the software development and testing lifecycle.

Service Virtualization is now maturing into a widely adopted technology, with many technology vendors embedded, and a market to support it. There are key capabilities any advanced enterprise dev and test team will need to have in a "live-like" virtual service environment that is as close to the real thing as it needs to be, without the constraints of excess coding, maintenance and reliance on big-iron systems to deliver new competitive functionality.

This paper is a good read if you are wondering where Service Virtualization technology has advanced over the last few years. It's not just about replacing the "stubs and mocks" developers used to hand-code with more pat request/responses. Today's apps have become far too interdependent, and fast-changing for that to be sufficient. Testers and developers must be able to recreate complex, composite workflows in an environment that looks and acts just like the real thing.

A smart counterpart at Infosys, Vijay Sairam Pratap, just commented on the story with a very compelling, clear anecdote about the level of realism needed from Service Virtualization to enable robust service assurance in his latest blog from an HP conference. We'll talk about that example, and a couple other newer real-world stories in our next post.

Link to Service Virtualization Capabilities whitepaper download page: http://www.itko.com/resources/service_virtualization_solution.jsp

 

ITKO - Evolution of a Brand

Here's a marketing-related blog instead of our usual IT best practices and business updates, so if that's not interesting to you, come back soon. You may have noticed an updated look for ITKO including a new website and logo over the last month or so, with visual changes prior to and after the news about CA acquiring ITKO.

As we continue to grow, so does our brand awareness. Most people look for ITKO because they've been referred to us by name. So while we still advertise, about 56% of people visiting our site either enter our full URL or search for ITKO and LISA by name.

Therefore, we embarked on a logo redesign working alongside our design firm this year. How did we get here from the "iTKO" you might have known in the old days?

• The new logo is a departure from the previous ITKO and LISA combined logo.  This is to clearly represent the company name as ITKO (pronounced "eye tee kay oh") from the product, still known as LISA.
• The ITKO logo and usage in text is now all caps -- very bold and clearly recognizable in small digital advertising and product formats as well as having larger, more readable size for both apparel and large signage uses in tradeshows etc.
• LISA, as a separate solution offered by ITKO, will retain a lighter, open box format and keep the "flower" part of the old logo as its product icon in headers, installers, etc. for the software product.

We are also showing a new tagline "Virtualize Everything" as part of this rebranding to help further differentiate our company and our approach around how we help customers simulate their IT environments and eliminate constraints, in large part through virtualization of inaccessible or incomplete services so teams can move forward. To do the job right we recommend you "virtualize everything." The tagline may change from time to time depending on what we are featuring.

The new site has a "big company" feel which becomes more and more important as we continue to grow rapidly and do business with some of the worlds largest organizations. We will continue to enhance our use of video throughout the site. Take a look at the new intro by John on the front page to see an example of high quality video produced entirely in house.  Check out the new look at http://www.ITKO.com and let us know what you think!

Take the voke Survey: What is Agile to You?

"To err is human, to err faster is Agile."

Just got a request to take an Agile Survey from our friends at market analyst firm voke, inc:

We are in the process of conducting a survey on Agile. We will use the data from this survey to create a voke Market Snapshot on Agile, the report will be vendor neutral. I know your customers have very strong opinions about Agile and welcome the participation of as many as possible.

So - here is that survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LNCVQ6H

I took the survey myself and it made me rethink exactly what Agile meant to me - hence the quote at the top. Funny, this comes up almost exactly a year after this blogger commented on Mark Masterson's killer video about Cloud enabling you to fail faster.

Like many terms in the tech world, "Cloud" and "Agile" often get misappropriated for somebody's marketing agenda. But both terms have the intrinsic value of mobility that the business side of the enterprise craves from IT: smaller incremental efforts and costs, and deferred larger decisions, so they aren't going away anytime soon.

I'm quite curious about seeing the results and comments our readers might add to the mix of this survey and the resulting report. ITKO customers generally tend toward the leading edge of what we'd call Enterprise Agile, but we will wager only 50% of them actually refer to their own efforts by the term "Agile." Let's find out!