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

 

A few more highlights from Impact (vid)

I promised some more scenes and footage from the show - so our media guy Paul just put together a neat little spot with some highlights from IBM Impact 2011. He said these were the only scenes where my footage wasn't too dark or shaky to use. All persons shown in the video, whether real or imaginary, are purely coincidental. Except John and Ruston of course, our founders planned to speak there.

 

Thanks again to all who made this show happen, and everyone who came to see us!

 

Just Landed from #IBMImpact 2011 - Agility is Smart Business

We're back and settled in after an exhilarating flight through IBM's Impact 2011 show in Las Vegas -- and not just because the casino pumps extra oxygen into the room. This year's Impact theme for IBM was "Changing the Way Business and IT Leaders Work." That covers a lot of ground, but so did the solutions on display this year, for instance IBM's acquisition of Sterling Commerce to bring new industrial processes to bear, not to mention new SOA, integration, Cloud releases...

iTKO's theme for Impact 2011 was "Open the Throttle for Agile Composite Application Development," and to commemorate it, we trucked an actual helicopter onto the show floor. Naturally, when you have an R22 dominating your booth, and people playing helo sim games, it makes a lot of people come by and ask "why the helicopter?" iTKO's founder and Chief Geek John Michelsen answers this and other questions in his on-site interview - watch it on the IBMImpact channel here.

Think about it - you wouldn't assemble or add parts to a helicopter without simulating that those changes would fly in the real world. And you wouldn't step into the cockpit without logging some simulator hours. There's just too much risk. The same applies to enterprise applications. With so much at stake, the ONLY way to be agile and rapidly deliver new functionality safely is simulation. This is exactly what LISA does with Service Virtualization for complex apps that IBM customers rely upon. By virtualizing away dependencies, data and performance constraints, teams can develop and test in parallel, at much lower cost, without impacting live systems.

All in all, I have to say this is the best show we've been involved with so far. The quality of the content, discussions and caliber of attendees was high. For us, the highlight of the show was our Customer Session on Wednesday: "Application Virtualization and End-to-End Quality without Constraints at Leading Banks and Telcos with iTKO." A special thanks to the LISA customers who came and stood up to talk about results they experienced - you blew away our expectations. We'll cover some of these results in a future post. But for now, here's a few more photos from the show.

 

 

 

Impact2011 Preview Video - LISA for WebSphere, SOA, BPM DevTest

Here's the follow up to last week's post on "iTKO Opens the Throttle for Agile App Dev at IBM IMPACT 2011 - Platinum Sponsor" -- which outlines 4 key sessions to attend at IBM's Impact2011 conference (April 10-15, Las Vegas - register here). In this new Chalk Talk video, John outlines some of the reasons IBM technology customers will learn something at the event:

 

Key approaches John covered in this latest Chalk Talk video - relevant to anyone in enterprise IT but especially tailored for IBM users:

1. Service Virtualization
2. Collaborative Defect Resolution
3. Continuous, End-to-End Testing and Validation

The reality of enterprise applications today is that complexity and rate of change will always increase. So if your company is doing IBM-enabled SOA, BPM, and seeking aspects such as data management and higher performance from applications, it will behoove you to explore ways to increase your agility and open the throttle with some of this new thinking.

iTKO Opens the Throttle for Agile App Dev at IBM IMPACT 2011 - Platinum Sponsor

Today’s enterprise software environments change rapidly, and you need the speed and agility to react and respond with new features at a breakneck pace. At this year's IBM IMPACT 2011, April 10-15 in Las Vegas, iTKO is a proud Platinum Sponsor of this huge IBM WebSphere integration, development and IT management conference (more than 5000 to attend).

Our theme for this conference is "Open the Throttle for Agile Composite Application Development," and we will be highlighting several ways that iTKO's LISA platform helps enterprises accelerate the delivery of high-performance composite applications backed by IBM's WebSphere, Datapower, MQ, Rational and Cloud-based solutions.

Hear iTKO's "Chief Geek" and founder John Michelsen at these IMPACT 2011 sessions:

• Tues, April 12: 01:30 PM - 02:45 PM - Venetian - Lando 4201A - Technical Session #2946A:
  “Service Virtualization and DevTest Cloud: Reshaping Application Development”
• Wed. April 13: 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM - Venetian - Lando 4201A - Customer Session #2954A: “Application Virtualization and End-to-End Quality without Constraints at Leading Banks and Telcos” (with special customer guests)
  

We're also hosting two "Birds of a Feather" lunches - bring your ideas and questions for the discussion:

• Tue, April 12: 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM - Venetian - Marcello 4403  Birds of a Feather Lunch #2956A:
  “Cloud-Based Development, Testing and Lab Virtualization”
• Wed, April 13: 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM - Venetian - Lando 4301B    Birds of a Feather Lunch #2955A
  “WebSphere SOA and BPM Testing, Validation and Lab Infrastructure”

Join iTKO at IMPACT, and find out how LISA solutions let your IBM SOA, BPM, and Cloud-based applications get to market on time, with drastically reduced cost and effort. If you haven't signed up yet, you can do so here.

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.

 

News from IBM on Development & Testing in the Cloud

Good news came out today from our partners at IBM that highlights many of the initial customer successes we're seeing for the discipline of moving software development and test processes to the Cloud - what we at iTKO refer to as DevTest Cloud.

The solution offering, called IBM's Smart Business Development and Test Cloud, encompasses several technologies and services from IBM and its partners. iTKO's LISA Virtualize technology is a critical catalyst of the solution, as LISA's Virtual Service Environments (VSEs) enable the virtualization of constrained systems and performance labs needed to make the Cloud a truly elastic, 24/7 ready resource for parallel dev & test.

You may remember two major announcements this year we've discussed on this blog - iTKO's role in IBM's Application Virtualization strategy, and our integration of LISA as a Ready for Rational solution enabling end-to-end testing and virtualization.

Key features listed in today's release "IBM Expand Cloud Offerings for Software Development & Testing" included:

• IBM Testing Services for Cloud - application virtualization: Clients rapidly create multiple virtual test environments customized for each development and testing team.  By providing testing teams with 24/7 availability without dependencies on back-end systems and data stores, the service gives testing teams the ability to test more thoroughly throughout the life cycle without worrying about data or service availability. A North American company using this service experienced a 22 percent reduction in the Function and System Test cycle and a 100 percent return in ROI within 90 days.
• IBM Testing Services for Cloud – performance testing: Brings together automation and performance testing tools to significantly reduce time by as much as 50 percent, the service provides flexible, utility-based testing that delivers on-demand performance testing, and offers robust, large-scale performance testing services to enterprises, via Cloud hosting.  This service identifies defects earlier in the cycle where they are less expensive to fix and eliminates performance-related bottlenecks.

How do customers start capturing the value above, and start utilizing Cloud Development & Test solutions like this today?  We recently wrote this case study with a major Telco customer that was an early adopter of our joint vision of VSEs and Application Virtualization in the Cloud, and they have certainly seen even more returned value over the last 6 months.

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.

Bringing Virtual Efficiency to Utilities - On IBM developerWorks Cloud Zone

The Utility and Energy industry is one space where "Green IT" is really creating "Green" end results in terms of customer usage and efficiencies. We have had utility customers for years solving software integration problems at the service- and message bus level, better validating and testing customer provisioning and billing apps. So that makes for some traditional software efficiencies.

 But what are some of today's more unique challenges where we can apply the entire concept of Service Virtualization - to remove resource costs and constraints - and make the software development lifecycle "Greener" by creating efficiencies at the very source of our power?

Article in IBM developerWorks Cloud Zone:
Service virtualization and validation practices for the utility industry 
Eliminating software constraints and mitigating IT risk to modernize energy delivery

I recently worked with LISA product manager/EMEA solutions director Chris Kraus on this interesting article - out today, that covers this for IBM's DeveloperWorks community of more than 4 million IT professionals. Thanks Aimee and the team at DW for the editorial help - we hope it offers some useful advice on how Service Virtualization, when applied to Utility IT problems, takes on a very real quality.

For one thing, think about Advanced Metering Systems (AMS), and the enabling software that sits atop a new Smart Grid architecture. We are literally seeing millions of new devices being added to the grid, every month. Across the global energy industry, there is a push to optimize energy infrastructure both at a network and customer level. Governments have mandated efficiency initiatives that are funded both by customer billing and subsidy ($3.4 Billion in government grant funds for Smart Grid projects in US, $21.4 Billion allocated worldwide in 2009).

Another cool area? Take a look at what's going on in Europe right now - but instead of smart meters, it's smart cars. Electric fuel points for electric cars have a similar value prop to smart metering - and pilots are going on in Germany, Netherlands and France. To get there, they not only need to set up the plug-in fuel stations, they need to anticipate the demands of a moving and growing customer base for electric fuel, and the metering and billing complexities that go with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

News Today: iTKO Teams with IBM for Application Virtualization in the Cloud

News flash (5/6/2010) - today from IMPACT 2010 we announced a new solution offering with our partners at IBM. Known as IBM Application Virtualization Services (or "AV"), this solution takes what LISA does well (Virtualization, Validation, Testing, Defect Resolution), wraps it with IBM services and technology, and makes this offering available on premise, or through an IBM Cloud platform, to solve critical customer needs.

• Press Release: "iTKO Teams with IBM on New Cloud Service to Help Clients Rapidly Deploy Applications"
• Download the Datasheet: "iTKO/IBM Application Virtualization"
• For more, see our Solution page for Application Virtualization

AV presents a highly differentiated solution to our joint customers, a solution that will revolutionize the way companies with distributed teams and technology components can build their applications. It's all part of a vision that goes beyond considering where software is deployed, to solving the root challenges of first successfully doing Development and Testing of that enterprise software where it will live in the Cloud.

News Today: iTKO's LISA is Ready for Rational

[Official news commentary] -- This morning we put out a press release regarding how we are extending LISA’s value and capabilities to IBM customers. You can read the news here:

iTKO Press Release January 19, 2010: iTKO Achieves Ready for IBM Rational Software Validation

LISA achieved a “Ready for IBM Rational” validation with a Best Practices designation, meaning that LISA integrates seamlessly with IBM Rational Quality Manager. In the press release we talk about how LISA complements the IBM Rational platform, and that our IBM partner status got upgraded to Advanced due to increased customer engagements and wins.

The progress is significant - over the last 2 -3 years we have experienced a lot of interest from the Quality Management space for using LISA Virtualize and Validate to eliminate constraints from testing, by virtualizing the behavior of services, middle tiers, web portals, databases and other components in modern architectures.

Today's applications have many components that are too large, or not accessible for copying onto new test lab hardware, or conventionally replicating via a virtual machine. For joint customers, this makes Quality Management solutions like Rational even more productive, while increasing efficiency in the hardware-based test lab environments that support them. The benefits of Virtual Services are even more evident in Cloud-based development and test environments.

Read further information about iTKO's other LISA Solutions for IBM's enterprise integration and development platforms, such as WebSphere, WMB, MQ-series messaging, DB2 and more.

Could Open Cloud Computing Continue to Coalesce?

I wrote recently about the public sector (US Federal Government) in playing a leadership role in cloud computing. The private sector is also making moves, as James Urquhar wrote in IBM, Microsoft, others align on open clouds.

James noted that representatives of Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF), CloudCamp, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and the IEEE-ISTO met. They agreed on a shared goal to promote use and awareness of open and interoperable cloud computing. They also discussed the ability to enable participants to be able to contribute and use results of broad community collaboration. There was also discussion of the possibility of a trade association or marketing association for cloud computing, but no actions were agreed upon at that time.

These kinds of activities typical for a technology that is still developing. I agree with the hope James expressed for open cloud standards operating in a cooperative, rather than competitive, fashion. I hope vendors are able to move forward with some vision around shared interests for Public clouds, while at the same time we see companies employing more specialized and secure "Private Clouds" and other hybrids such as the "Personal Cloud" we recently talked about, for specific software lifecycle purposes.

The release of an Open Cloud Manifesto, originally authored by IBM, was not without some disagreement, as Microsoft objected, and there were plenty of differing opinions thrown around the blogs I read after this announcement. The group's site shows that many players have signed up but, as James notes in another post, the "big four" of cloud computing, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com, are not signatories so far. You can find the Open Cloud Manifesto at opencloudmanifesto.org.

It notes five challenges to adoption: security, data and application interoperability, data and application portability, governance and maintenance, and metering and monitoring. Several of the challenges this collective is concerned with, are also factors that in our experience, customers are very concerned with; especially the quality and validation aspects of governance, and the portability of Cloud services through virtualization of software components hosted in the cloud to eliminate some dependencies and per-use costs.

The manifesto concludes that it is meant to "begin the conversation, not define it." Obviously these kinds of industry groups are promoted merely as representatives of common interests, and not legal entities. However, we look forward to the rest of the story as the cloud coalesces.

James Governor on Combining Cost Reduction with Innovation Through SOA

James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, recently spoke at IBM Virtual Global SOA Forum. Joe McKendrick provides a transcript of his talk on ebizQ, "Work Smarter, Take Out Costs In a Tough Economy." He begins with saying that he "wants to talk about culture, because service oriented architecture clearly sounds like something technical, but really if you want to succeed, its going to be all about the people."

He goes on to say that SOA is the language of change. SOA was started, in part, to enable businesses to become more flexible. "Enterprise customers were concerned that their cost of integration was very high. Once they had built a system, effectively, they poured concrete onto it." This probably affected the thinking about business process and the ability to innovate, and not simply the technology components.

In today's economy, change is needed more than ever. It now takes on two components, the ability to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, and the ability to do this in a cost effective manner. Though SOA was once an overhyped term, there is a "little soa" in the way companies are now quietly using service-oriented approaches to create real value.

"Little soa" encompasses everything else lumped under flexibly leveraging technology to meed business needs - from BPM to integration platforms, rich Internet apps and REST-based approaches that have business services under the covers. "Little soa" can address both of these components and hopefully changes the way people think about innovation and the capacity to engage in it and implement it. This is where the people side of technology comes in.

James goes on to say, “We're going along this road, and it’s very important that we need frankly, a fast car that will keep us on the road. And SOA is a language that the business can talk to IT and systems, in order to stay on that road. In order to have alignment, so that we can move forward, and actually deal with change, and deal with these curves that we're being thrown."

He later mentions virtualization. This is one way to keep the fast car moving forward and stay on the road at lower cost. We have been covering this in our series on Field Reports on SOA Success. See for example, Part Five: Major Airlines. Here the airline was able to virtualize the kinds of services that are normally prohibitively costly and complex to replicate using conventional means, and keep their SOA development and testing on track.

(Concrete Photo by Brenda Anderson and Car Lights Photo by miss blackbutterfly both from Flickr.)

Analysts & Pundits: Will IBM buy Sun, and is that a Good Thing?

Big news on the technology horizon, and here at iTKO we are watching the development with much interest: See Reuters' "IBM in talks to buy Sun" story, among many other stories on it.

Network World's Denise Dubie caught several analyst insights in their coverage of the emerging story, "Could IBM be Sun's savior?"

Also check out eBizQ's discussion board if you care - lots of the usual suspects we talk to in SOA/BPM/enterprise architecture chiming in over there. Here was my (quick) comment on the topic:

"Yes I think it will happen, and from my development perspective, while we might like healthy competition and choice in vendors, it is better a strategic move now than a fire sale for Sun later. IBM practically owns enterprise computing, and they have gone out of their way to own a big chunk of the Java world with it.

Sun has tried very hard to attract developers, lately, open sourcing as much as they could - but open source is a hard space to compete in because it doesn't generate cash! By hugely funding Eclipse, IBM spoiled the IDE market for Sun and a number of other players.

Still this will be an interesting development to watch, as we are talking about a boatload of innovations and 2 very different cultures that would need to be folded together here."

SOA Success Stories Part Four: Global High-Tech Manufacturer

Here's another tale in our series of field stories to show successful cases of ensuring quality and agility for dynamic enterprise apps. This case covers how a global high-tech manufacturer tested and delivered a demanding enterprise e-commerce site under time and budget.

In this case there was a lack of visibility and traceability that was posing a serious threat to mission critical business operations. Unlike some of our other cases, this company had complete control over the design and implementation of this complex multi-tier app, yet they still had no way to trace a single action to a single source in the maze of multiple service layers.

Ruston Vickers, iTKO's CTO & co-founder, worked on this effort. He said that before the test automation project, the company had to do manual sequential tests on each subcomponent to find error sources: "It was like having to place a plumber at every faucet to find the source of stoppage in a house with hundreds of rooms. Instead of having the plumbers yell back and forth across the large house as they progressed through the system, turning on faucets one step at a time, LISA gave the company an x-ray machine to see a top-down view of the entire system at once and determine the cause and effect."

This top-down viewing capability cut their best prior testing time in half. Formerly the company employed 10-15 consultants just to continually test only the end result UI behaviors of their system. Now, with a highly reusable and complete test suite in place through iTKO LISA, the consulting firm can conduct the same process with one part-time resource, at a higher level of accuracy, as the automation capabilities of LISA erase the margin for error inherent in manual testing.

The company is pleased with the reduced costs and increased speed of implementation, and the consultant on the project is pleased with the increased value they can provide to their client. With LISA they both have a reusable asset that will continue to provide value as they go forward together with new releases.

Reusable, continuous validation activities save hard dollars in testing labor costs, and the number of support costs incurred, but cost savings aren't the only value. In a customer-facing environment, eliminating 1-2 months of time to successful release can make a huge impact on incoming revenue potential.

Oracle buys BEA - Nice time to get a check-up

The biggest news in software may have already hit this year, but it's not like we didn't hear it coming for the past few months. Oracle finally makes good on its intent to buy BEA at $8.5B: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120048691486294361.html

To us, this is good news -- like when SoftwareAG and webMethods merged - it combines a strong integration firm with a global presence, with a technology leader in the SOA space.

It's also a good move for Larry. Aside from increasing their customer base, it really moves Oracle more into the SOA mainstream - almost every customer we know has some Oracle apps, databases and integration inside their enterprise, but adding some leading AquaLogic ESB and Governance aspects of BEA will make a huge difference in advancing Oracle FUSION as an SOA platform.

Oracle getting JRockit from BEA also bodes well for performance, as now they can optimize that for the Oracle application stack.

For BEA customers, at least the anticipation is over, and they can continue to move forward with their plans with this reality in mind. I'm quite sure the best of BEA's stack will still be going on in the FUSION platform. Plus, for quality and reuse, consolidation of a SOAP stacks is a good thing. Both BEA and Oracle were operating their own SOAP stacks, and combining those particular efforts will create better interoperability for a whole lot of customers.

Is this too much consolidation? There are still several choices for how you provision SOA - you can go TIBCO, SoftwareAG/webMethods, IBM or HP, now Oracle/BEA, maybe Microsoft, or even open source, and there are best of breed tools out there that still perform unique functions in the SOA ecosystem. See, SOA is still something you DO, not something you buy. The business requirements should still lead the technology decision in every case -- and that doesn't usually jibe with the "one vendor fits all" strategy.

Where's the risk to BEA and Oracle customers? As a vendor charged with testing and validating platforms from both BEA and Oracle, this will create many new opportunities to help companies integrate and ensure business continuity as the story of consolidation continues to evolve.

We recommend that whatever your preferred tools are, that you follow best practices of creating a set of baseline component and system-wide tests of your "as-is" environment, so that as these two platforms are merged and upgraded, you will be able to test and maintain Business Continuity throughout the process. This is equally important if you decide to move to another vendor as well.

While we do believe that the combined new company will certainly make a commitment to customers, if you are in IT there is no shortcut to quality. Your best strategy is to establish a line of defense against unforeseen consequences -- with a thorough, and thoroughly managed suite of tests.