The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

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

 

News: iTKO Positioned as a Visionary In Magic Quadrant for Integrated Software Quality Suites

2011 Market Report Covering Functional, Load and Performance Test Automation and Management Vendors Now Available

DALLAS, TX, February 24, 2011 (BusinessWire) -- iTKO, the leading provider of Agile and Composite application development platform solutions, today announced it was recognized as a visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for "Integrated Software Quality Suites" for 2011 [report view license is now expired].

The study, which rates an estimated $1.3 billion market for test management, functional and performance testing software, assesses vendors according to their ability to execute and completeness of vision. Among the evaluation criteria were innovation, market understanding, marketing and sales strategy, product strategy and business model maturity.

"Rich-client technologies, Web-connected devices and private cloud architectures are placing stress on the testing organization to adequately test software. The shift toward packages, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) also drives greater business analyst involvement in overall quality efforts, along with a shift in focus from finding defects in validation to ensuring that business objectives are met," said the report, authored by Thomas Murphy, Research Director, Gartner.

"We are proud to be positioned as a visionary by Gartner in today's competitive software quality management and testing market," said Shridhar Mittal, Ph.D., CEO, iTKO. "Our company's positive movement over the last two years is an indicator of the results our customers are reporting in optimizing their software lifecycle with LISA software. We also believe our profile is enhanced by iTKO's significant relationships with the three largest vendors in our space to enable LISA's capabilities for their teams and customers, including service virtualization, end-to-end testing of composite applications, and Cloud-based development labs."

Readers can now view a complimentary copy of the complete report, a US $1995 value, as part of a Gartner Newsletters Program for a limited time at this site: [report download now expired]

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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.

 

Pooling Major Software Costs in Clouds Across Large Enterprises: Will it work?

Found an interesting article from Bob Evans in a recent InformationWeek - major financial firms are working up a cloud consortium to try and negotiate down some of their IT costs by pooling resources. Of course, we are familiar with this concept in government requisitioning, group payer negotiations for healthcare... but how will it work for IT?

"Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle"

True, if anyone has the clout to push the big software vendors to offer them economies of scale, it's banks like Bank of America and Deutsche Bank, and if this were going to happen anywhere, it would be in the Cloud. However, while there may be commonalities between large banks, in terms of the types of workflows and compliance issues they need to support, the enterprise software packages they are likely to be running are very seldom standard one size fits all applications.

I think like many seemingly disruptive changes, this strategy will have more utility for a new class of "shared utility" types of Cloud-based software that represents a small percentage of functionality that can be shared across global banks. This will be like a "toe in the water" to gauge the temperature for a bigger plunge later.

For more strategic operations, the inherent uniqueness of financial systems in different countries, and even global competition, will still require custom purchasing and large service contracts from the software giants, and the SIs that support them. I'll certainly be watching this story in the coming few months to see how it plays out.

HP to Resell LISA Virtualize - The News

iTKO and HP recently signed an agreement which created a significant piece of news: "iTKO's LISA Virtualize Software to Be Resold by HP to Reduce Testing Costs and Accelerate Time to Market for Modern Applications"

There is a lot of value to capture here. In every major enterprise IT shop we go into, we find that there are a growing number of constraints to testing created by what the industry is calling "modern apps" -- highly distributed, componentized, loosely coupled applications that no longer reside within a company's four walls. Call it SOA, SaaS, Cloud, pull in BPM, legacy migration, etc. and you have a recipe for quality chaos.

Many of the systems we need for software development are supporting live transactions, contain critical customer data, are inaccessible to the team, and perhaps even charge significant fees for each access. IT shops can literally spend 40-60% of their development time trying to configure test beds, code "test responders" or stubs of needed services, and massaging data into and out of the system before and after each functional and performance test. Faced with these constraints, companies simply do not test as early or often as they should, and quality and performance suffers.

We are familiar with virtualizing servers and desktop apps, but what about the above highly constrained pieces that make up a modern app? These systems are resistant to hardware virtualization, but they can definitely be virtualized behaviorally with LISA, so now HP test and development team members can get access to them on their terms.

This functionality is complementary, but very different from the well-known practice of hardware-based virtualization, in that it is not imaging a hard drive or desktop OS as a VM. Instead it is an automated software-based solution to virtualize the behavior of downstream dependent systems, services, data and components that may not be under a team's control. There are huge benefits to be gained in terms of faster delivery cycles, fewer production errors, and much lower cost and effort of managing test environments, coding stubs and managing test data.

It's a fact that there are more performance and functional testers with HP's testing software installed than any enterprise solution on the planet. And every one of them could stand to benefit from having robust test environments that are readily available to work with. We think this is great news for the software lifecycle when the world's largest technology companies are working to solve some of the largest problems out there.

Stay tuned for more news about this partnership here.

Recent coverage of the announcement (in progress):

• Dana Gardner in ZDnet: HP Partners with iTKO on LISA Services Testing Suite for SOA, BPM
• Virtualization Journal: We particularly liked an article from Maureen O'Gara: "HP's Got a New Girlfriend Called LISA"
• Vance McCarthy in IDevNews: "HP To Sell iTKO LISA for Virtualized SOA, Apps Testing"
• eBizQ "iTKO's Virtualize Software to be Resold by HP"
• StickyMinds.com News
• Official iTKO release on BusinessWire.

Talk about Service Virtualization at HP Software Universe '09

At this year's HP Software Universe we're thrilled to be talking about a quality practice where we've seen incredible strides made over the last two years. The concept sounds simple enough: Virtualize away my upstream constraints and dependencies so that the test lab (for instance HP LoadRunner and Unified Functional Testing) solutions have a self-contained environment for testing.

However when you look at how complex and interdependent today's applications are, you begin to understand why replicating these complex behaviors -- such as unavailable or secured systems, third-party Services and components that are still under development -- has been resistant to replicating via conventional hardware virtualization means.

What is really cool is how we've seen customers of HP and iTKO bring this particular challenge under control. If you are planning on being in Las Vegas for this year's HPSU 2009 - June 15-19 - we invite you to take an hour to join HP Senior Product Manager Jeffrey Meyers, and iTKO Founder/Chief Geek John Michelsen to find out how these Virtual Test Environments can eliminate constraints (and costs) in a big way.

Session 1497: Thursday, June 18 - 10:30am - 11:30am
"Eliminate testing constraints and test earlier in the lifecycle: using service virtualization to drive testing momentum"

Here's the abstract of the session:
If your IT team is struggling with obstacles outside your organization, then join HP and iTKO and find out how HP testing solutions, combined with the iTKO LISA Virtualize platform, can minimize external dependencies and help you test earlier in the development cycle, before a complete test environment is ready to meet your testing objectives. You’ll hear how the combined HP and iTKO solution works in complex shared environments of modern applications, agile development techniques, and volatile data sources to make your testing efforts constraint free.

If you are planning on being there, look us up on Twitter as well: http://twitter.com/itko and drop us a note or feedback on your thoughts.

It seems in June we really catch the "last gasp" of interesting IT events, and this month is no exception - besides attending this excellent summit, we are bringing in the summer next week presenting sessions in Chicago at Technology Executives Club and a Federal roundtable at GTRA in Virginia. Hope we see you at one of these key events soon.

More on SOA & Cloud Governance from HP via Dana Gardner

Dana Gardner recently posted on Enterprises can leverage cloud models and manage transition risks using service governance, says HP.

Dana had a conversation on the role of cloud computing, services oriented architecture (SOA) and governance in exploring cloud opportunities with Rebecca Lawson, Director of Service Management and Cloud Solutions at HP; Scott McClellan, Vice President and Chief Technologist of Scalable Computing and Infrastructure in HP’s Technology Solutions Group, and Norman Lindsey, Chief Architect for Flexible Computing Services at EDS, an HP company. Dana provides highlights in his post and you can also read a complete transcript of the discussion.

The panel pointed out that virtualization and the associate cost savings are not dependent on cloud computing, but they are an enabler of it. The panel focused more on the cloud than SOA, but they had a number of useful thoughts. I liked the panel’s comment that -- “In the longer term, the more overarching impact of cloud comes when your IT department can deliver value back to the business, rather than just taking cost out."

That is more than a novel idea - for the past few years we've talked too much about driving cost out of IT, instead of driving value into the business.

Some examples? "Using aspects of social networking and other aspects of cloud computing, and the fact that cloud is delivered over ubiquitous media, the Internet, to increase 'wallet share,' increase market share, maybe bring higher margin to a business, and build ecosystems, and drive user communities for a business."

This allows cloud computing to be strategic and not simply tactical. As cloud computing becomes more strategic, it becomes even more important to have a solid governance model to make the decision on whether to move from the traditional deployment model to a cloud-delivery model. In the process of getting to a service-centric IT governance model, organizations are going to have to deal with the governance model for deploying new services (see also – Dana’s post on IDC research shows enterprise SOA adoption deepens based on certain critical practices).

These governance models can better sort through the risk/reward trade-offs on cloud computing. Of course a good testing and validation strategy takes out some of the risk side of the equation. The panel added that tougher economic conditions would heighten the acceleration of cloud computing, and not just because of the opportunity to save cost (see also Direct Insights Analysts identify IT winners and losers in global economic downturn). The panel said that opportunities for the cloud to bring value are high when it can drive user communities with users and consumers of whatever it is your business produces, using techniques of social networking and other web-based capabilities. In these strategic cases that directly touch your customers, having continuous validation of services is especially critical.