The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

Forum: What was the biggest development for Cloud in 2011?

Participating again in the eBizQ forum on Cloud - and starting the process of looking back on a very eventful year for ITKO (and CA Technologies) in 2011, and picking our horses for what will happen in 2012.

The most obvious thing we saw in Cloud was a continued increase in consumerization and public level awareness, thanks to the usual suspects of Amazon, Apple, Google & Microsoft. You would be hard pressed to complete a download of consumer media or software these days without an invitation to claim your own Cloud spot for storing information or streaming your playlists.

But what about big business? How effectively did major companies in other industries embrace the Cloud? I just wrote a little piece on this here: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/12/what-was-the-biggest-development-in-the-cloud-for-2011.php

The biggest development for the cloud this year was, well... development IN the cloud. The categorization of Cloud as "another place to host your apps" provided some incremental efficiencies, yes, but that's a pretty commoditized activity. We always knew the cloud could do more!

Setting up elastic, on-demand dev and test environments in cloud actually turns out to be the best first use case of cloud in the enterprise. As developers need to create new functionality and verify its performance and quality on top of layers of existing stuff, they all inevitably demand their own environments.

We've seen many enterprises that have dev and test environments outnumbering production environments by 7-to-1 or more - and with inconsistent accuracy, as there is a great deal of manual setup and maintenance involved in each of those instances. Let's harness all that excess computing power and pool it inside the company as Private clouds -- and for higher capacity or seasonal needs, instantly provision ready environments in Public clouds. [more >]

Hopefully that makes sense to our readers who live in the application development and testing world -- you are in the vanguard of Cloud simply because these activities are the most natural first step, and there are immediate infrastructure efficiencies to be gained right off the bat.

As for the rest of our predictions and a look back, stay tuned...

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.

Forum: What Don't Companies Get about Cloud?

Recently participated in a forum thread from our friends at eBizQ: "What do companies still not get about Cloud Computing?"

A lot of this uncertainty stems from the old stalwarts of "Is the Cloud secure? Is it scalable?" -- and I think the panelists here debunk those fears pretty well. There are many well-secured ways to take advantage of Cloud, with almost unlimited scalability -- a lot more effort has been put into that at the big public cloud providers than most companies' own web and firewall strategies.

Now, let's get down to SLAs, or service level agreements in the public Cloud - many of which are starting to improve dramatically, while most still pretty much disavow responsibility for interruptions and downtime. Caveat emptor.

That said, Cloud is already happening, and is still going to happen - there is no way to escape the business appeal of provisioning IT resources and software in an on-demand basis. We are seeing many of the world's biggest customers first pooling resources within their own enterprise and rapidly obtaining a Private cloud, while thinking of Public cloud only for the highest capacity or "edges" of their applications.

Here was my take on this topic - read more at http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/08/what-do-companies-still-not-get-about-cloud-computing.php:

"Yeah we gotta do it. But who owns it, and who buys it?" Cloud as a term can cover so many departments and responsibilities within an enterprise.

Is it general corporate IT infrastructure (stuff like shared drives, backups, security & email)? Or is it the company's revenue-driving edge where business functionality is developed and delivered to partners and customers (commerce and differentiated service offerings)?

Often we are seeing larger companies with a more innovative bent hiring a "Cloud Czar" type executive or guru -- with a responsibility to overlay multiple organizations and map out a Cloud strategy. It's not always optimal, but at least then you have someone looking at the bigger picture.

Anyway, we recently had a great little meeting of the minds with some of our customers on this particular Cloud topic as well as the "Czars" and front-line job skills and talent pool of the future in our industry, so look for more interesting material on that coming soon.

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

 

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!

Bridging the Cloud Divide with Development & Test Platforms

(With iTKO's guest blogger and Solution Strategist, Ken Ahrens) Your boss wants you to "do Cloud," but you’re not sure ... so what now? At least you are not alone in coming to grips with Cloud. We recently saw this article from one of our favorite columnists Joe McKendrick, covering a CA Technologies-sponsored survey of both IT execs and practitioners. Check it out:

ZDNet Service-Oriented Blog: "Cloud divide: senior executives want cloud, security and IT managers are nervous"

There are a number of interesting data points about Cloud adoption in the article that made us think:

1. 44% of executives name security teams as primary opponents of public cloud (27% private)

First of all, your leading public cloud provider should have more resources exclusively dedicated to "perimiter security" than your team can muster, and they should be able to address many of the typical concerns of external access like firewalls, authentication, etc. So the real question is: how securely designed are your applications themselves?

This is a great reason to start by moving Dev and Test activities to the cloud.  In most mature enterprises the non-production systems shouldn't be using real customer data anyway.  What better way to ensure the protection of the data? How about by first moving the desensitized or "clean" data into virtual data models that meet the needs of dev & test teams; and then running lots of analysis to make sure none of the "safe" information gets out during the process, or in deployment through use of the software.  This would be a prudent 2-step approach to the problem. We outline aspects of this in our latest paper on "Service Virtualization and the DevTest Cloud."

2. 52% of IT managers fear job losses

Although we don’t normally comment on this kind of thing, it’s interesting to think that this would be a viable concern.  The point is that employees should move up the value chain, and concentrate on providing more vital services to their employer, and therefore its ability to deliver for customers.  Managers should be focusing on how much more agile they can make their teams in rolling out new features and functionality to the market, and Cloud approaches should be malleable to these efforts.

3. 80% of all enterprises (and 92% of large enterprises) have at least one cloud service

Shouldn’t this stat vindicate the security and control concerns?  If we’re already doing Cloud, we can point to a project to determine if control has been lost or data compromised.  These case studies should be reviewed seriously to determine the correct course of action for the next round of services. We just talked about this "Cloud Creep" in a previous blog -- so if it’s already happening, you’d be much better served to figure out how to get on board.

4. Mature adopters of cloud are already virtualizing.

Not a big surprise here that once you have grips around server virtualization, moving to the cloud should be much more straightforward.  The two naturally fit together. But all this cloud infrastructure puts even more of a strain on key "over utilized" systems that cannot be virtualized, especially in a Cloud environment. For more on this, see our paper on "The Next Frontier for Virtualization: Over-Utilized Systems." 

What about all of those mainframes, ERP systems, third party service providers, and large databases?  How will they cope with additional systems looking for access? That's where Service Virtualization is an applicable practice -- productizing the practice of simulating those over-utilized systems is also a way to bring "off cloud" and out-of scope systems into scope.

What are your Cloud concerns? We only covered a few of the points in the article, so let us know and we'll talk about them here. Thanks to Joe for the overview and CA for making these empirical survey results available.

Virtualization or Cloud? Both or Neither? Why or Why Not?

Recently commented on eBizQ's Forums about a question that on first read seemed rather silly: Is it better to use Virtualization for some business apps rather than the Cloud? Here's what I said about it:

"It's hard to picture how it is better to use one than then other, when both could be perfectly applicable. I would expect virtualization to be a commonly accepted precursor to leveraging cloud-based environments for applications."

The discussion here, especially in posts by Ian and Lori, does a great job of making sure we aren't lulled into thinking of Virtualization and Cloud as either/or propositions. You are talking about two totally different things. But let's play devil's advocate and discuss how they are not very different.

1. Near-Ubiquity. Virtualization, as in hardware/desktop VMs and system images, is now par for the course. And we expect Cloud Computing as defined here to also become a major part of every enterprise IT strategy - in fact, we think it truly arrived this year. Therefore, both are present in most major IT shops already.

2. Complimentary Value Proposition. Obviously, you have compelling reasons to do both - I like Satoru's quip on "selfishly" utilizing several different Virtual images on an Amazon EC2 Cloud environment - perfect for quickly launching or freezing several different versions of his software lab depending on their reliability or versioning needs. To an extent, you can use both for similar value reasons: cost efficiency, more optimal use of computing resources (and/or capacity), system flexibility or elasticity... again, different things but similar value props.

3. Constrained by External Factors. Lastly we have discovered that Virtualization and Cloud are most similar in what they CAN'T optimize conventionally. Almost the same behavioral rules apply here - if it's a system or server you have access to and control over, it is easy to image as a VM, and also logical and cost-effective to deploy it in a Cloud. If you are dealing with an Over-Utilized (high traffic and size) system, or one that is Out-of-Scope (external to your dept. or a major service outside your company's authority), BOTH hardware virtualization and Cloud quickly become ineffective or constrained. Here's what I commented on that:

"There will still be some over-utilized business app resources that are also resistant to both - it doesn't make sense to try to replicate a 2TB mainframe as a VM, or stick it in a public cloud..."

A solution to the above constraints for both, is a technology we call Service Virtualization - this is now a very mature solution space and something we've been discussing for more than 3 years  here, since we introduced LISA Virtualize product features. Virtual Services provide a companion to VMs, and simulate the behavior and performance of those Out-of-Scope items, so when and if you do deploy both in a Cloud, you truly get an elastic, constraintless environment for software development and testing purposes.

iTKO's 3 IT Predictions for 2011, and How 2010 Played Out...

Another year of accelerating change in IT has swept by, and as we clear out our inventory of leftover holiday cookies and cakes, we also like to collect some of our predictions for the upcoming year, while seeing how this past year went in retrospective. (Please note, these are in no particular order, and they are just the opinions of some iTKO execs we collected by passing the hat for thoughts - use at your own risk!)

Predictions for 2011: Are we entering a "Nirvana Age" for software development? We are starting to think so - more on this concept later, but here are 3 trends we predict for the coming year:

1. An Agile Resurgence is happening. Companies are increasing their commitment to Agile methodologies - but the big difference this time is that we're not talking about a few development teams adopting XP/Scrum etc. - Agile Resurgence will be the mandate Agility across the overall IT and software development lifecycle, so you will see it cover an entire delivery organization. Companies will measure their overall success in meeting customer requirements in terms of improved Agility - speed and efficiency across design, development, testing, support and services as a whole.
2. Enterprise Cloud will take hold. By the end of the year, we expect serious enterprise Cloud adoption to accelerate rapidly beyond merely using it to improve infrastructure and hosting capacity. A whole new class of business process applications that leverage cloud will appear, along with new Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities that make cloud an environment for collaboration and software development itself. We've been talking about DevTest Cloud for most of 2010, and we are seeing major enterprises take it as a part of establishing their enterprise-wide cloud initiatives.
3. Shakeout in Testing space is still not done: We have seen that many companies have delayed or deferred replacing their existing UI-based testing and load testing tools and focused mostly on development tools with testing as an afterthought. That is going to change bigtime, as companies can no longer afford to have exponentially increased test labor costs, and risk of failure accelerating faster than software can be delivered. Customers will demand both deeper testing coverage across complex multi-tier apps, as well as new Cloud- and service-based delivery models for testing that can offer more flexibility and labor efficiency.

Retrospectives for 2010: Did we call it? Well, this time last year we were busy releasing LISA 5 Suite, so we didn't stop to make 2010 predictions we can grade ourselves against. But here's some observations we couldn't help but make.

1. The Cloud took off like we thought it would. We're not a market research firm, but we couldn't help but notice an explosion in Cloud strategy and implementation. In our own customer base, the number of inquiries and interest of "how do I move to Cloud?" and "Should I use a Private Cloud?" increased by 3-5X over just the last 6 months. We sponsored a couple Cloud-related events and webinars, and found a huge increase in both attendance and sophisication of this audience.
   
   
2. Service Virtualization became a line item on the IT budgets of market leaders. We saw an increasing number of project requirements and RFPs here and in Europe specifically calling for more than just "stubbing" of responders for testing and development. 2010 was a breakthrough year for the concept of virtual services: the simulation of behavior, performance and data characteristics of systems that are constrained or unavailable throughout the development lifecycle, and customers want to know how to resolve these big constraints to delivering software. A big part of this awareness was assisted by our partnerships with HP and IBM, allowing customers of their testing and ALM product suites to simulate constraints in their environments with capabilities from iTKO's LISA Virtualize.
3. A weak economy did NOT take any pressure off IT to deliver more functionality, faster, maybe it was even worse due to it... While companies likely spend 2-3x the time scrutinizing their budgetary plans for IT, and hiring was usually frozen, companies could not afford to slow down one bit. Increased competition for customer dollars, rapid consolidation and acquisition in many markets, and more regulation all created big IT projects, often without a commensurate increase in budgets or resources.
4. VMWare successfully defended its near monopoly on large enterprise IT virtualization; it was predicted by many they would fail (not us!) thanks to competitive or open-source pressures.
    
   
5. SOA Governance fell flat.  This was definitely last year's fruitcake, regifted. It still seems like such a great idea - the runtime part of governance enables companies to do some cool stuff which kept some of the players afloat, but we didn't hear many inquiries about SOA Gov all year long.

 

From SOA to SO-What (or, SOA Is Dead Is Dead)

As you can tell we've been all Cloud and Virtualization, and not much SOA on this blog lately. And there's a good reason. Just commented in what may be the last of the eBizQ expert forums on why SOA (which stands for Service-Oriented Architecture for those who forgot about it) may or may not have failed in the past as an architecural approach to delivering business applications.

The Forums Editor Peter Schooff asks "What reason do you give for the initial failure of SOA?" citing a recent update from Burton about SOA "rising from the ashes." Well that is one way to look at it if you also stated that "SOA is Dead" a couple years ago. (Of course, we understand both statements were not made in all seriousness and they were circulated through the pundits with healthy irony...)

Here's what I said about it:

We've gone from SOA, to SO-What. I agree that it never really failed, and it is quietly contributing real value today. It might have gotten a bad reputation just because a few early adopter companies bought a particular vendor's SOA "bill of goods" or ran down a JBOWS (Just a bunch of web services) route, and found everything didn't fit together as expected, projects ran over, etc...

That rep of a few people getting burned (perhaps by not fully embracing a SOA approach) was the only real issue with SOA. 3-4 years ago we were finding some IT leaders stating "I'm NOT doing SOA - DON'T mention it again in this room, we are doing continuous integration," but despite avoiding the term they were indeed moving down a SOA path. Now, major enterprise IT does not need to make this distinction.

I thought Michael Poulin and Tarak Modi made good brief points too. Hey, if you think SOA was a failure, chances are you weren't doing it right - you weren't actually allowing the software to be delivered in a services-oriented way, you were accepting some grand vendor lock in instead of allowing for some platform independence, you were trying to dictate an all-or-nothing strategy with partners trying to connect to you - the list of ways you can fail at SOA were quite long.

And that's before we even address the issues of maintaining continuous quality and validation in the face of constant change, something that SOA makes much more complex. Or talking about how some of those service dependencies can become huge constraints to the software lifecycle that we need to virtualize in novel new ways.

We enjoy having a soundingboard for this stuff, as we watch each new IT strategy or technology get pulled by the pundits from hope, to disillusionment, and if it works, back to hope again. There is real value being proven every day by companies who let sound architecture and focused discipline drive their SOA initiatives, even if we don't talk about it that much anymore.

(Picture: I took this in 2006 at Prague Castle, a Kafka-esque skull riding on a man figure)

 

John - Talking Cloud Development & Test on TMCnet

Here's a clip from my trip last week to Sys-Con's Cloud Expo 2010 West - I had the chance to catch up with TMCnet Executive Editor Erin Harrison for this interview about DevTest Cloud, and the trends we are seeing at this event.

Enjoy:

 

Here's to a continued - and inevitable - maturing of this sector of the Cloud market. Much of the remaining cost and constraint of IT is in properly equipping very expansive and widely distributed dev and test teams with ready environments that support needed scenarios.

 

Seeing the BPM Process is Believing

I recently commented on this eBizQ forum on "What is the single greatest benefit of BPM?" here:

"The biggest benefit to me is the simplistic view: that BPM represents the process that actually gets executed, in a visual model that the business can actually understand.

The "dirty little secret" of integration heretofore was that while we made neat little whiteboard sketches or UML diagrams, the business process itself would be implemented and coded behind the scenes by technicians in a way that probably didn't resemble the process at all.

The inability of business stakeholders to be involved in real process design - because it used to be an exclusively technical endeavor - is exactly what created disconnects between requirements and delivery. So in my opinion, the visual model of an executable business process itself is the most important benefit of BPM."

This got me thinking further about how both the business expert and the software dev/test organization should get a literal big-picture view of any analogous technical activity, rather than work from two different blueprints or interfaces.

Why was a computer with a mouse better, when at the time an expert user could certainly work much faster using keyboard shortcuts? Why is a multi-touch phone better, when discrete keys clearly require less dexterity and produce fewer input mistakes? Sometimes the long-term capabilities of a more interactive UI supercede any immediate productivity hit.

Thinking of testing or development activities in a BPM view will involve some tradeoffs in efficiency over specialized interfaces, but may net better results as delivery will be much closer to requirements. In the long term, new methods for collaboration can arise from the presence of a shared visual interface as well.

We've certainly taken this to heart in thinking through shared aspects of test and dev interactivity and making our LISA Pathfinder product have a more collaborative, process-oriented UI. While both testers and coders need to drill down into specialized tools, there is something to be said for a common view that all teams can use to speed up interaction as service-based software and cloud applications become more complex and interconnected.

SearchSOA Editor's Notebook: DevTest Clouds

A little while ago our CEO Shridhar Mittal, and IBM's Cloud executive Walter Falk had a chance to catch up with SearchSOA (TechTarget) editor Jack Vaughan. Jack wrote about our conversation on development & testing in the Cloud in his Reporter's Notebook:

Reporter's Notebook: "Push and Pull in Software Development"

Our discussion focused on how development & testing groups are addressing the increased costs and complexity of today’s distributed applications, by trying to move quality left in the lifecycle. However, there is an exponential increase in the amount of dependencies in the software lifecycle -– systems that are unavailable, costly to access, or simply not finished yet for development purposes.

This is where what IBM calls "Application Virtualization" comes in, with development and testing representing the most valid use cases for building applications in the cloud. This offering (see the post on the joint IBM/iTKO AV offering from May, and the IBM Rational news from June) paired LISA's form of Service Virtualization of unavailable or constrained 3rd party services and systems, with a full suite of ALM development and testing solutions, and best practices from IBM's services and technology groups.

Dev & Test are the most obvious places for larger enterprises to start moving to Cloud. With so many existing systems and multiple teams involved in integrating new software functionality, the virtualization of constraints as a "DevTest Cloud" is the key to productivity in the organization.

The question here is not "Where do I host this to save some costs or have additional system capacity?" That is important, but in this instance we are first asking: "Where is your software being built, and how efficiently is that delivery process meeting customer needs?"

This solution can be offered on an IBM Cloud, or other leading cloud infrastructure providers, but replacing some hardware is not the primary significance. It does not matter where the DevTest cloud resides: Public, private or a “personal” cloud on the user’s desktop, what’s important in our view, is that it provides an unconstrained platform, with dependencies resolved for successfully developing, testing and delivering applications that are ready for a service-oriented, or Cloud-based future.

State of the Software Quality Market

Recently read a blog from Gartner analyst Tom Murphy, with some preview metrics from his Magic Quadrant study on Automated Software Quality Suites. In it, Tom points out growth and market share metrics for the 16 or so players remaining in the space. Take a look here:

"The Small Grow - But HP Continues to Dominate"

iTKO gets called out for growth in the article: "iTKO had by far the most successful year cashing in on partner relationships and its relatively complete platform for organizations seeking to take advantage of SOA and Cloud technology platforms."

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 ...  ;)

eBizQ Podcast: Should you take a "Big Bang" Cloud Approach?

I recently had the chance to catch up with eBizQ's Forum Editor, Peter Schooff -- and record a podcast about iTKO's perspective on Cloud Application development. To us, Cloud Apps are the ultimate form of modern, distributed enterprise applications - they leverage everything we've done from service-orientation, virtualization, business process management and SaaS to date.

I think Peter asks some very salient questions - take a listen, read the full transcript of the interview (cool feature of their site), or download the mp3 Podcast here:

ebizQ Podcast: Should You Take a 'Big Bang' Approach to the Cloud? iTKO Explains

Cloud Apps are the apps themselves - not the hardware (or virtual hardware) they are hosted on - which are unique from the well known practice of Cloud Computing, which addresses and commoditizes computing capacity in deployment. We are especially excited about how developers and testers will be able to use Cloud App platforms to revolutionize their efficiency and reduce costs throughout the software lifecycle, so I hope that comes across in my interview.

What's the next big obsession for Enterprise IT Geeks?

As an occasional pundit and commentator on IT trends, I've had a lot of chances to watch the "next big obsession" come and go for enterprise IT shops. The one commonality we've seen, is that if the obsession successfully takes hold in business, then it will become so ubiquitous that it becomes kinda boring to the IT guys on the cutting edge.

So goes the case for SOA... We've tracked the "Is SOA Dead?" thread over the last couple years and it was fun, because it points out just how common SOA has become part of the enterprise IT landscape, delivering value so quietly that we almost take it for granted now. Just like "eCommerce" used to be a big deal, then it just became the nature of doing business over the Internet.

So one of these questions I posed to Peter Schooff of eBizQ was this very thing - and he posted it to their Forum - What are Enterprise IT Geeks Obsessed with Today? I was looking for stories, and not the next dot on an analyst wave or cycle diagram. He posted the question and some fun answers there.

Clearly you can't escape Cloud Computing right now as the grand champion of obsession (Make mine Private or Public?). Mobile platforms and smartphones - riding high again. RIAs, particularly REST-type web apps are garnering a lot of geek attention. But what never changes is that these innovative obsessions aren't just about money - they are inevitably tied to doing things better, more efficiently than before. The cost savings and revenue upside are the results of success, but not necessarily the motivator.

I particularly liked Sandeep Gupta's comment in the forum that "IT geeks do not change...they are always passionate about the technology space/environment that they work in.....obsession brings aspiration and passion...leading to effeciency and growth" and that to me describes the accelerating nature of innovation that is going on here.

Also great - Brenda Michelson's comment (via Twitter) about "Hopefully getting things done!" Well put. And Phil Ayers laments that IT folks he runs into "just don't have time to be geeky enough and keep up with, let alone apply, the vogue technologies and methodologies." Yeah, there is probably a little too much talk about the next big thing and not enough application going on. So until next time...

How Soon are BPM and SOA Merging?

I just joined in another fast forum on eBizQ with a good question posed by uber-SOA blogger Joe McKendrick:

"There has always been a huge cultural divide between the business folks, who felt that they own BPM, versus the IT folks, who own the architecture or the technology architecture, which would be SOA. So do you think BPM and SOA are going to merge, and if so, how soon?"

Judging by the rapid-fire responses alone, I can tell this strikes a nerve with lots of the experts. I can certainly understand the concern about yet more redefinition and lumping together of terms that aren't really related. However, I don't see this confusion as a problem in practice as much as others might.

In our experience the most successful SOA implementations are being driven at a high level by a BPM process, even if we aren't talking about directly connecting a process engine with a SOA registry for instance. It isn't going to happen overnight, but the SOA implementations without business process orientation will die out and be replaced by business-process driven SOA, which the business can justify budgetary considerations for.

Anyway, yet another good conversation and I invite you to take a look.

Modernizing Legacy Apps: Still Sexy?

Yes, legacy modernization might be about as un-sexy as you can get as far as IT practices go. But we know that these venerable IT assets are a reality of any serious operating enterprise, and making those mainframes and core systems work in today's architecture is still a very hot topic for discussion.

Our John Michelsen recently joined in a good discussion on the eBizQ Forum. Question posed by one of our favorite bloggers, Joe McKendrick: Are Web services protocols such as SOAP and REST and AJAX effective for building SOA off of mainframe, large systems or legacy environments?  Or is message-oriented middleware more advisable?

Well, yes, and yes as John mentions... they better be effective at bringing those systems into a modern architecture, if you are using them. Many developers and architects can get quite dogmatic about SOA vs. REST, or how MOM solutions like ESBs are good or evil.  It sounds like a blanket statement, but the longer we are in the business of aligning IT around business, the more ambivalent we must become about these distinctions.

Anyway I think the Q&As going on there are worth reading, and we are seeing a lot of the "usual suspects" in SOA punditry and integration expertise weighing in.

On-Demand App Dev Strategies with Compuworld's Mark Hall

I recently had a chance to catch up with Mark W. Hall, an analyst and writer for Compuworld. Mark was especially interested in the concept of bringing development and testing environments into readiness in his blog "On Demand App/Dev? Not yet, but closer."

Mark talked to several vendors that are in application quality related fields, as this can often be an underdeveloped aspect of development. In other words, we are now take an extremely "agile" approach to developing new functionality, and the quality or ability to test all of the components and interconnectedness in an application's environment just hasn't kept up.

Here's an excerpt of Mark's article:

"At iTKO Inc. in Dallas the company's LISA product lets you tests services (in the cloud or in your data center) virtually. Chief Geek John Michelsen says LISA watches how your app interacts with a given service over time, then it creates a virtual instance of the service with all of its behavioral quirks and features that you can test as often as you like. Michelsen claims it is unrealistic for a developer to test against a live service."

[Just as a clarification - I believe we definitely must enable developers to test live services for checking implementation - however I do believe developers and testers cannot get access to the production environment to do so 95% of the time they really need it, especially if it is already handling live customer transactions...]

Mark also asked about hosting these virtual environments in the Cloud, and a resounding YES, we already see Cloud providers and partners offering up Virtual Services capabilities, playing nicely alongside other virtual servers and machines that make up a well-rounded test environment. Look for more from us on this topic soon.

Testing Cloud Performance Strategies: Mike Kavis

Read a recent article from a very active pundit and practitioner in the Cloud Computing space, Mike Kavis, titled "Architecting the Cloud: Testing performance in your cloud application."

In the article, Mike advocates a layered approach to testing cloud-deployed applications that makes a lot of sense, in terms of the kinds of performance testing you can actually do while the design and development lifecycle is going on. To summarize, this involves testing from the system roots up while the solution is firmed up in this order:

1. Infrastructure. Test performance of the cloud provider(s) to ensure they can sustain the needed load.
2. Data. "it is time to analyze the impact of encryption, transformation, data replication, and the various ways that data is being manipulated to address security , compliance, reliability, and scalability requirements."
3. Business Logic. Interactions of services and processes.
4. User experience. Does the application meet user needs?

[Image Source: Mike Kavis]

This is a solid approach for testing to happen while a "build from scratch" cloud-based project is being designed/developed. Testing the raw performance level of the infrastructure first is something worth validating early on, and so on up the stack, finally testing the business logic and application when they come together.

Mike talks about how covering the core performance of the cloud infrastructure early can mitigate risk at deployment: "... It would be very expensive to find performance issues from the lower levels of the architecture at this point. That is why I recommend the layered approach to performance testing. What I also like about this approach is that you can start testing very early in the life cycle."

To expand on this discussion, one way to shorten this cycle is through Service Virtualization, which is the practice of simulating and modeling the behaviors and performance characteristics of components, business logic and even UIs in the cloud that are not yet available for live testing. This kind of virtualization can go a long way toward eliminating service and 3rd party system dependencies and bringing performance testing to bear much earlier in the process.

Then, after that rollout, there remains a continuous validation need. (Only so much you can cover in a blog, so this is a topic we'd like to see Mike address in a future post... por favor... : )

For instance, the infrastructure itself may behave differently under the kinds of data and usage variability in ways that you could never predict with the raw-traffic or user interface kinds of performance benchmarking. New versions of services can be introduced, the Cloud provider can do something that affects their performance -- the list of risks goes on and on. Continuously validating going forward is a way to ensure that there are no unintended consequences of change at any one of the above layers.

All in all, it is a nice development to see practitioners showing real architectures and methodology around Cloud Computing as it is being applied for the business, as opposed to continuously defining the space, so I'd recommend keeping up with future posts from Mike.

Dan Woods on Brick Walls Of Virtualization

Brick Walls Of Virtualization is the title of a recent post by Dan Woods at Forbes.com. The subtitle is, "Without automation, creating and managing system images will slow adoption." I could not agree more.

The "brick walls" refer to the burdens of virtualization that come along with the benefits. On the benefits side Dan mentions the cost savings of less physical servers; increased flexibility to provision systems or change configurations; and better access to resources in the cloud. This latter benefit outsources complexity and shifts capital expenditures to operational expenditures.

You would be hard-pressed to find a large company not already leveraging some mix of hardware and software virtualization. Especially in a down economy, it has obvious value.

However, Dan then brings up the burdens of brick walls. The good news is that the number of physical servers may drop due to support cost and energy pressures. And, the potential bad news: the number of virtualized servers and devices can skyrocket without the physical constraints, and each of these virtualized devices still needs to be managed. We are seeing this all of the time in our major enterprise client engagements - virtual instances can proliferate quite rapidly if not managed carefully.

Here's another, deeper challenge of virtualization in enterprise IT: for all of those virtual servers, you still have dependencies or "wires hanging off" of those, leading to big iron mainframes, SaaS applications, 3rd party services, what have you. These dependencies are resistant to hardware virtualization, so they need to be simulated with behavioral virtualization.

I personally like to compare this phenomenon to unmarked leftovers in a shared refrigerator... [whose food is this, and without opening it up, can I figure out how long it has been here?]

Dan adds that a "whole new class of IT systems-management software and techniques is needed to create a virtual data center operating system." Part of the increased requirements for systems development and administration involves testing and continuous validation, and part of this involves better management of both VMs and Virtual Services, a topic we will discuss in further detail on this blog.

There is much more in Dan's post and I recommend going to Forbes.com to read it. I liked his concluding remark, "The upshot is that IT, which is dedicated to automating the rest of the business, must start spending more time automating itself." Well said.

Sandy Kemsley's "Column 2" Blog - BPM, Enterprise 2.0 and More

Sandy Kemsley is an independent analyst and systems architect, specializing in business process management, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise architecture and business intelligence. She also writes the great blog, Column 2 on “BPM, Enterprise 2.0 and technology trends in business.” In the blog Sandy provides links to stuff she finds interesting and her own summary.

The longer posts include a lot of event commentary. I liked her summary of a recent Gartner webinar covering what to do in your first 100 days as a BP Director. Just like the first 100 days of a presidency, this time period sets the tone for BPM efforts. The Gartner content was sound, but Sandy added that the actions are more likely to take 18 months rather than three. She said that the complete webinar is likely available for replay and Gartner has two BPM conferences coming up: February 23-25 in London, and March 23-25 in San Diego.

There was also a useful case study on BPM at West Bend Insurance. To be able to better compete in the small business market they used BPM with a focus on reducing the quote-to-issue time from days or weeks down to just minutes or hours. The case study webinar was sponsored by a BPM vendor but as Sandy wrote, “the BPM philosophy and agile methods that they used can be used with pretty much any BPM product: that’s more an issue of corporate culture than the specific product, as long as it provide model-driven process development.”

Sandy has been in the IT space for over 20 years including time at IBM. Since 2001, she has been a maintained a consulting practice as a BPM architect, performing engagements for financial services and insurance organizations across North America, and as an analyst working with BPM vendors. She also creates and delivers BPM and related training courses. So if you are looking at some ways to achieve business-driven improvements in IT, take a look (and so will we).

Some More Good SOA Business Blogs - Enough for Now

I have now written a six part series on software community blogs. This has included some of our larger partners such as Oracle, TIBCO, and Software AG who maintain multiple blogs with a community.  I also covered the Agile Commons blog by our partner, Rally.  We have some other partners who have excellent individual blogs, or in the case of Infosys, a great collection of blogs. A list can be found in the right side of this blog. Here are three more of them.

dynaTrace is a leader in lifecycle application performance management.  The dynaTrace blog covers issues related to performance, scalability, and architecture. The authors are Alois Reitbauer and Andreas Grabner. The most recent post when I looked was on Error Analysis Process: The Weak Spot in Manual and Functional Testing. It resulted from Andreas Grabner’s participation in the recent QAI Quest Testing Show in Toronto, ON. He said that he found that much time is still wasted in the testing process with excess needs for communication between testers and developers. He offered the solution that “capturing diagnostics information on the tested application provides all the information for developers to analyze and fix the problem without having to request additional information and without reproducing the problem. It saves a lot of time and overhead and frees valuable resources to do the work they should really do.”

Infosys defines, designs and delivers IT-enabled business solutions for Global 2000 companies. It offers a collection of blogs that “discuss the business of technology and the technology of business in the Flat World.”  One goes by the name Think Flat and has the tagline, “The business world is being disrupted by the combined effects of growing emerging economies, shifts in global demographics, ubiquity of technology and accountability regulation. Infosys believes that to compete in the flat world, businesses must shift their operational priorities.” The most recent posts covered the evolving financial crisis. There is a total of 14 blogs when I last looked.  One of particular interest is on SOA - Service Orientation Applied. One recent post, Making Your SOA Journey Successful – Key Aspects, has a number of useful tips to avoid SOA mistakes.  It included the importance of governance and where to focus this governance.

Patni Computer Systems, Ltd. is partnering with ITKO to deliver SOA Testing services as part of its comprehensive Verification and Validation (V&V) practice. Patni also provides the blog, In Sync. There are multiple authors. A recent post by Sandeep Patil covered, Customized product inquiry - Eliminating "Muda." The post quotes a study done by Giga Information group, citing that the acceptable response time a customer would expect for viewing the result of a modification demand is up to 20 seconds. He goes on to add that such a response from a salesperson using the manual configuration process is almost impossible. However, with the advent of a configurator solution, it has become a reality - increasing customer satisfaction at lower cost. There are also links to podcasts and longer thought papers.

We'll check back on these partner and peer blogs occasionally, and continue to add them to our lists here on the iTKO LISA SOA Soapbox.

VMware – Sixth in Our Series on Software Community Blogs

VMware, one of our partners, has the VMNT blog which provides virtualization news from VMware and the community of virtualization users, including the VMware Communities and VMTN, the VMware Technology Network. This blog also lists 17 other VMware blogs, each with a specific focus.  There is the Console blog that is VMware's Executive Blog. It has contributions from a number of VMware executives. The Develop Center Blog supports their developer community.  There is the WMware PhD blog that provides education on VMware products.

Ed Albanese,
Product Management, 
VMware Application Virtualization Technologies writes the VMware Application Virtualization blog.  The VI Team Blog provides implementation tips. The VIX API Blog discusses the VMware VIX API which allows you to automate VM and guest operations on VMware Server, Workstation and ESX.

The blog, VMware: Virtual Reality, carries the subtitle, Setting the Record Straight One Post at a Time.  It responds to industry claims. There is a nice review of Why Choose VMware that provides their competitive differentiation is a single clear post.  The one prior to it addresses claims by Microsoft. There are others such as VROOM! by the VMware performance team. It is nice to see a focused set of blogs that cover a range of issues.

The VMware blogs also list 22 WMware employee blogs and provide a longer list of blogs on Virtualization. The VWware employee blogs are individual efforts, a good way to advance the advocacy of Virtualization for their community of practitioners with real examples.

Sun Microsystems – Fifth in Our Series on Software Community Blogs

One of our partners, Sun Microsystems, has an excellent collection of blogs. Sun's News Blog has a list of some of these blogs around Sun including Jonathan Schwartz’s blog & other senior executives.  Jonathan is Sun's President and COO and he was one of the first senior executives to start a personal blog. He recently shared a memo he sent to Sun’s leader about the role of technology in helping with the current economic crisis, Innovation Loves a Crisis. He writes that many businesses will be most open to change now and he wants Sun to help its customers achieve greater innovation and boost productivity in response to economic challenges that many face.

Others bloggers include Mike Dillon, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary and Dave Douglas, Vice President, Eco Responsibility.  It is nice to see the head of Legal write a blog, primarily covering legal issues as many lawyers area bit shy to blog. Dave Douglas writes about technology and environment.

There is also the blog, On the Record, which covers breaking news and the latest information from Sun and Reviews Interactive blog that discusses Sun product reviews in the press.  This is a great mix of specifically focuses blogs.

Sun is famous for its blog guidelines that lead with this quote – “Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note.”  There is much more detail, and their policy of sharing information has served as a model for many other firms.  See our sidebar category, Blog Reviews, for the other posts in this series.

Agile Commons – "A Community to Support Software Agility"

I have added a new blog to the list of blogs we read. Agile Commons is run by Rally Software as a means to share information about Agile development.  Rally provides Agile lifecycle management solutions. As their site states, “Rally unites Agile project management with tracking of requirements, tests and defects, so everyone has a real-time picture of your project’s features and quality, priorities, roadblocks and risks.” There is a lot of great content to support Agile development is available through their site and through Agile Commons.

The Agile Commons blog is a collective effort of the community and you can request an invitation to join.  There are plenty of comprehensive and useful posts. Luke Hohman just did a three part series on Why Prioritizing Your Product Backlog for ROI Doesn’t Work. Luke starts with the premise that pundits tell developers to prioritize their backlogs to generate the best possible ROI. But he has not found an Agile teams that does this. Then he explains why using ROI for prioritization does not work in three comprehensive posts.  He basically feels that it is hard to get good data and is thus a fool’s errand.

Instead of ROI, Luke suggests gathering stakeholder preferences, making sure efforts align with corporate strategy, and look for initiatives that drive profit. These do seem more concrete than ROI.  There are many other excellent bloggers contributing to this conversation. Building a knowledgeable community of Agile Coaches and experts is a good strategy for Rally.  Luke’s post and a number of the others, such as Rachel Westin and Evan Campbell,  are related to topics explored at the Agile 2008 conference, August 4-8 in Toronto.

Through the Agile Commons blog you also gain access to the Rally Community, Agile University and Agilistas – a collaborative community dedicated to evangelizing and advancing Agile practice. All of these resources are worth checking out. 

Software AG - Fourth in a Series on Software Community Blogs

This post on Software AG is the fourth in our awareness series on the community blogs of enterprise software firms who have products that iTKO customers are looking to test and validate.

First off, the company is part of an SOA community and accompanying platform we support, the Centrasite initiative, which consists of a SOA Registry/Repository, and other management tools. We offer LISA to CentraSite customers as a way to validate Policy so it can be directly enforced, as well as publishing some whitepapers and advice to the community at large.

Software AG has a community site with an invitation to join their Software AG blog. The blog says “Spanning a range of topics from emerging technologies to the latest trends in SOA, BPM and BAM, Software AG blogs chronicle the unvarnished thoughts of Software AG employees. Find out what company leaders, topic experts and guest bloggers think about the technology landscape of today - and tomorrow. Become a part of the conversation by reading and sharing your comments with us!”  While they do not allow non-employee blogs, like SAP and Oracle, you can make comments and join the conversation. They blog was just started in April 2008 and there are 6 posts on SOA governance so far and 5 on SOA. There are nine bloggers so far and their pictures are found in the right column.

The top post when I looked was WOA + SOA + POA = SOA, posted by (our associate since his days when Infravio was merged into webMethods, and then webM into Software AG), Miko Matsumura, Deputy CTO, Software AG with 294 visits. Miko quotes one of our favorite bloggers, Joe McKendrick, who cites Anne Thomas-Manes in defense of SOA success stories, "The issue, Anne points out, appears to be that SOA is still siloed within the IT organization, and the transformative effects have not yet spread to the business. Line of business managers, she observes, are not ready to share services, the crux of SOA value. Anne says so far, she has only come across one company that has been able to connect SOA success to business success, through the establishment of strong positive and negative incentives that encourage people to adopt a better attitude toward sharing."

Miko agrees that SOA is currently overly siloed in IT, and writes that there have to be ways to get the value expressed in business. He puts the answer in the larger context by discussing that SOA is really all of the following: Component Patterns (SOA), Process Patterns (POA), and Human Patterns (WOA). He concludes, “Since SOA is Seismological, consider that it is an inevitability, but only if you look at it in the geological time scale. WOA is sociological and therefore has a greater chance of establishing momentum in the short term. What remains to be seen is if WOA, SOA and POA emerge as a postmodern rethinking of the role of technology in business.”

Here's to breaking down the silos that Joe and Miko describe, and getting all teams to open up about the value they expect to receive, as well as the value they acheive.

I enjoyed browsing the Software AG blog posts. Their efforts are just starting but the quality and depth of posts is high.

Oracle Blogs - Third in a Series on Software Community Blogs

This post on Oracle Blogs is the third in our awareness series on the community blogs of enterprise software firms whose customers we work with on a daily basis. Oracle has a blog community portal - It says, “Welcome to the Oracle blogging community, where Oracle executives, employees, and non-employees alike exchange views about customer requirements and best practices for using Oracle and industry-standard technologies.”  There is a long list of employee and non-employee blogs listed by topic.  Employee blog topics include: Database App Development, Database Management and Performance, Middleware & SOA. The non-employees blogs also have blogs under these topics. There are more topics in both cases. It seems like there are more non-employee blogs and customer activity. Technorati reports 2,523 blog reactions to the Oracle blog community as a whole so it is well read and commented on.

Under the Middleware & SOA topic I found the David Chappell Blog. David is vice president and chief technologist for SOA at Oracle. Chappell has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and is the author of Enterprise Service Bus (O'Reilly, 2004).  I liked his post, ROI by the Ton -- Going Green with SOA, EDA, RIA and Web 2.0, where David discusses the business value of SOA.  He quotes a David Linthicum blog post on "Is SOA Green." We like David and his Real World SOA blog is on our blog list. David wrote, “the more efficient a business is, the fewer resources, natural and otherwise it will consume. Thus, the better the business is automated, and business processes optimized, the more efficient it will be. The primary of objective of an SOA is both efficiency and agility through architectural rejuvenation."

Like David Chappell, we agree with David Linthicum that by limiting "consumption of resources" you are reducing the denominator in the value equation -- so strong automation and reuse directly maximize this return on SOA investment.  He provides an excellent case example from a Verizon implementation of a new Fraud Detection application. As a conventional benefit, the implementation is designed to help reduce power consumption by 99.5%. The new implementation also has 0.5% of its original code - and minimizing the code in deployment to just what is needed reduces the support and maintenance cost of any application drastically over time.

Another blog is SOA Station: Mind the Gap written by Peter O’Brien, a software developer at Oracle in Dublin. He started the blog on his own a year ago and noticed a big bump in traffic when it was added to the Oracle blog community.  Peter focuses on financial services applications. Matt Wright's Blog covers discussions, examples, tips and trick on Service Oriented Architecture from BPEL through to Web Services Management. Matt also works for Oracle. He provides a very comprehensive and interesting post on Using Analytics to Modify In-Flight Processes.

Clemens Utschig writes clemens' soa@oracle blog. Clemens works within the SOA Product Management Team @ Oracle Headquarters. Before moving to the states, he worked for Oracle Consulting Services in Austria, troubleshooting and managing critical j2ee/soa projects within EMEA. Richard Naszcyniec's Blog is written a Consulting Technical Director with Oracle Professional Services where he specializes in system architecture and technology. This gives you a small sampling of the range of the backgrounds, conutires, and professional focus of the Oracle bloggers. The community also includes many consultants outside Oracle who work in the Oracle environment. All in all, a wealth of useful information to mine.

TIBCO Community Blogs – Second in a Series on Software Community Blogs

This post on TIBCO Community Blogs is the second in our series on the community blogs of leading integration and SOA platform software firms.  The TIBCO Community has a blog site. You need to register to gain more access. It looks new and there is only one blog so far, on TUCON 2008, but this blog has many authors, including people outside TIBCO such two of the bloggers on our lists, Dana Garnder and Joe McKendrick. SOA TIBCO is the most popular tag. The most recent post is When Real-Time Isn't Fast Enough: Notes from TUCON 2008 was written during the event.

It discussed a number of topics including an addition to the run time SOA governance, Service Performance Manager, which “cleverly bundles some of its Business Events complex event processing technology to tell you whether you're meeting the Service Level Agreements, at least from a performance standpoint. It takes the assumption that service levels are a classic complex event processing problem, especially given the kinds of highly scaled and highly distributed networks that TIBCO customers tend to have.”

At the same event, in another TUCON 08 blog post by Dana Gardner wrote that CEO Vivek Ranadive used his keynote presentation to describe the need for an "event cloud" to support the demands on the next generation of enterprise infrastructure. He said that “an elevated level of cloud management would allow for complex business events and activities to occur in "real-time" at the huge scale demanded of modern business processes. He said TIBCO's goal remains the same as it has been for years, to the bring the right information to the right places at the right times. Only now is that vision nearing fruition, and the combination of SOA and cloud computing will make it happen.” Ranadive also spoke against having data trapped in databases, preferring a pending era of data portability.

An alternate place to check out is the IT Toolbox group of TIBCO EIA users. It is a real user board - geared toward the bit twisters trying to solve tactical issues, but there are at least a dozen or so active threads going on every day, on everything from legacy enablement to managing BPM inside BusinessWorks.

This was certainly much of what we are finding TIBCO customers doing every day - how do I turn my technology "silos" into something much more flexible that runs on the information bus (the "TIB" in their name), and how do I validate and prove that it will continue to meet changing needs? It was great to join them at this last TUCON and here's to the creation and promotion of the "TIBCOmmunity" of users.

SAP Community Network Blogs – First in a Series of Software Community Blogs

As a point of reference, the challenges and solutions we encounter in trying to manage, test and virtualize major vendor solutions have a source in the dialogue of the user, services, and developer communities that support it. Most of these firms have blog communities so we decided to take a survey of them over the next few weeks, starting with SAP.

SAP Community Network Blogs have been in operation for some time. It covers many topics. It is easy to become a member of the SAP Community Network and that gives you more access. You do not have to be an SAP employee to have a blog, only a community member so there are bloggers who work in the SAP space but are not employees. The community site is well organized with blogs by date, by topic, top blog posts, active bloggers, etc. There are clear guidelines on what you can do.

Many topics are listed including: Business Rules Management, Business Solutions, Composition Environment (CE), Emerging Technologies, Enterprise Performance Management, Enterprise SOA, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and SAP Business Workflow. Technorati reports 5,407 blog reactions to the SAP blog community as a whole, so it is well read and have plenty of coverage in the blogosphere.

I took a look at the Enterprise SOA area. One post, Enterprise SOA on SDN and BPX – The Good Stuff Just Got Better  by Mark Yolton of SAP, commented on how they recently reorganized the Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (enterprise SOA) pages, information, and tools in the Enterprise SOA section of the community. Mark Yolton is Senior Vice President of the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and Business Process Expert (BPX) communities. He said that the Enterprise Services Community (ESC) area has grown and expanded with new members, groups, and successes,” which is good news to us at iTKO. 

Mark goes on to write, “We know that service-oriented architecture (SOA) is about breaking monolithic systems into components to access valuable business logic as standards-based services. Services can be combined into new services that support enterprise-wide business processes and can be reused to maximize efficiency and reduce total cost of ownership. However, effectively managing your IT with SOA principles means your SOA blueprint needs to reflect business semantics. To achieve this, you need a comprehensive governance process and design methodology that safeguards service quality, stability, and standards compliance.”   These are all principles we support.

Another post, How to approach the transformation to enterprise SOA, by Bjoern Treutel of SAP covers their methodology. A post by Daniel Stollenwerk describes the Enterprise SOA Development Handbook. There is a wealth of material here and if you are leveraging SAP in your enterprise (and that's a huge community indeed...) this community is certainly worth exploring.