The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ITKO Insights, with Gartner Research, Issue 2 -
Winter 2011 - Ensuring Agile Composite Application Development


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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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!

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.

On the Forums: Is Cloud Computing Now a Business Necessity?

How widespread is the use of Cloud now, and is it a business imperative, or just another deployment option? We recently commented on this on our favorite forum at eBizQ:

 http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/01/is-cloud-computing-now-a-business-necessity.php

I thought Lori MacVittie's comment that "... the "business" doesn't need cloud computing. It needs applications." was very appropriate. True, business isn't usually driving cloud adoption. The IT side of the business has the most immediate gains to realize, having to offer more computing capacity while responding to budget pressures.

However we are seeing two current trends that are very real. Some major companies have identified Cloud as more than a different hosting option, or another word for leveraging somebody's SaaS applications. They are mandating that any business activity, including not just using functionality, but building and testing the applications themselves, must happen in the Cloud.

On top of that, you have what Alain Rap calls "cloud creep," which is the inevitable march of individuals within companies going ahead and using Cloud to get around administrative and procurement issues. Here's what John said about it:

It'll be like Palmolive. You're already soaking in it!

I would say right now about 20% of Global 500 companies identify full Cloud-enablement as an important strategic initiative. But what about the rest?

It may not be defined now as a necessity, but for many companies it is already becoming a reality - you have individual developers and business unit heads, tired of a multi-month IT cost justification for provisioning new servers and elastic capacity to test and run their apps... and many of them are just going out with their credit cards and purchasing some Cloud capacity or leveraging business services on their expense accounts.

What do you think?

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)

 

Notes from Cloud Expo 2010 - This will fly...

Just got back from Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara, CA, and this year's event was very much a coming of age for Cloud. Attendance and expertise levels were high. Two years ago when I audited a Cloud conference, the subject matter and vendors present seemed to be catering to an MIS or webmaster-level audience - largely a sideshow to the SOA/Virtualization audience concerned with moving servers off the racks of their data centers to save some incremental network and hardware costs.

iTKO's "Chief Geek" John Michelsen talked Tuesday morning on "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Applications" and it was standing room only, with plenty of good audience interaction - a lot of developers and testers in the audience from a show of hands.

If you want to see the content from this session, and a little more specific to LISA DCM, I suggest you attend the iTKO webinar Wednesday, Nov. 10th, 1pm CDT: What Makes a DevTest Cloud Fly? (And what is the value?)

We are seeing a maturing of the space. Hardly anyone here is trying to "define Cloud" anymore. Not as many irrational fears about "is the Cloud secure? Can it perform?" Even in infrastructure terms, the Cloud offerings here are more specialized, for instance, leveraging private Cloud storage for content management uses, or offering industry-specific services atop cloud infrastructure. From my perspective talking to attendees on the Expo floor, people are looking for ways to develop business functionality to take advantage of Cloud, and not the other way around. Also it was good to see more reporters and analysts stopping by.

John also participated in the CTO Round Table that evening, and he will cover that discussion in an upcoming post.

What's the Best First Use of Cloud? iTKO on eBizQ Podcast.

Over the course of this year we have had an increasing number of customers who have made a commitment to "go cloud" as a strategy to realize flexible, on-demand computing capacity and IT cost savings in a broad sense. You would assume that we would also see some huge success stories in Cloud, but they are still waiting to be seen.

I just did a Podcast with eBizQ's forum editor Peter Schooff called "What's the Best First Use of the Cloud?" to discuss where companies could start their Cloud efforts to realize the maximum benefit for the minimum outlay, specifically in the software development & test area. http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/2010/09/whats_the_best_first_use_of_th.php

What stymies Cloud? It's not the negative hucksters who make unfounded complaints about the lack of Security or Performance in Cloud. An application that is poorly secured and tuned will be a problem whether or not it is deployed in cloud. No, we are finding the biggest issues to real cloud development are the elements of Cloud that are still external to your control or scope.

Don't just "stick your apps in the Cloud." Make your apps, integrate them, test them and tune them in a DevTest Cloud, where all of the external dependencies, data and configuration are ready anytime.

New Analyst Product Report: LISA 5.0 Technical Audit - Ovum

Useful news out today about some available research -- iTKO recently participated in an independent product review of our latest LISA version 5 Suite with UK-based analyst firm Ovum (formerly Butler Group) principal analyst Rob Hailstone, The research was not sponsored by iTKO, however we have purchased rights to the report so you can download it free for a limited time at http://itko.com/ovum.

In the report, Hailstone provides this overall assessment of LISA's market:

"LISA Suite provides a comprehensive set of testing capabilities that will allow customers to improve the effectiveness of their QA function for SOA or other component-based development environments. The functional modules can be enabled individually to satisfy point-solution testing requirements, but make most sense when deployed together as an integrated suite.

LISA Suite is targeted at large organizations serious about the use of SOA, but limited deployments at the department level provide a common entry level. Organizations deploying applications into a public or private cloud will benefit from the end-to-end visibility and root-cause analysis provided. LISA Suite is less appropriate for smaller organizations or those using SOA technology for simple integration."

For many years, LISA was often considered by market analysts only as a "SOA Testing" tool, which is a useful definition, but not necessarily one that represents the scope of many of today's development and performance challenges for teams dealing with complex, distributed architectures. This document points out it's also not just about SOA, as many enterprises are more concerned with BPM, Virtualization and Cloud, which are not tied to a specific architectural style or approach.

Why did we license the report? Well, after a comprehensive functionality comparison and walkthrough process, we think the report Rob produced provides a pithy overview of LISA 5 software. You can download your own copy and decide for yourself...

Agile Cloud Development: Go Forth and Do the Wrong Things, Faster

Horror stories abound in the cloud... and fearful pundits rule the day, questioning the viability, security, or unknown costs of the enterprise adopting Cloud. But the reality is, it is going to happen anyway. Why? Because developers and testers can afford to adopt it on an as-needed basis without a capital expense mandate, and cloud allows software teams to fail faster.

Cloud is not just some "cheaper pay-per-use place" you deploy your apps. It is the culmination of distributed software development processes. The ideas of SOA, BPM, loose coupling, all play into the design of enterprise software for Cloud.

The beauty of developing and testing in the Cloud is not guaranteed success. It is that we can fail far faster, and at a much lower cost. One of our partner sales friends recently sent me this excellent little speech from CSC's expat Mark Masterson (check his blog here):

(Uh, whoever that bank is at about (13:40) in this clip, who lost $500M+ waiting for teams to have sequential access to test environments, needs a Virtual Services Environment to not only provision infrastructure with VMs, but also simulate those off-cloud dependencies in far lower cost for Cloud.)

I like what Mark is saying about companies being obsessed with reducing the risk of failure rather than the cost of failure. They spend all of their energy with a balance-sheet mentality - ensuring that any expenditure has less risk of failure, and in turn, delay projects and limit their options. Driving down the cost of failure is what enables real agility - allowing companies to delay their decisions to deduce the most optimal directions.

As a musician I make a point out of failing faster. The reason for practicing with others is not to play the music perfectly - instead, it is about going for it, and getting all the bad notes and bad ideas out, before you invest in recording or playing live. The same goes for software. If you had unlimited, low-cost ability to try options, rather than having to predict the one with the least chance of failure, you would find the best one much quicker.

Cloud is going to be the reality of distributed enterprise applications, because no matter what the pundits say, before it is a deployment option, it is an optimal platform for agile software development and testing. So get out there, and fail faster!

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."

Mind the Development Gap in Virtualization and Cloud Approaches

We recently had the chance to catch up with Eric Knipp, who happened to be in the area (yes, we have astute local Gartner analysts in Dallas, and no cowboy hats on in the room). He made an interesting point: that the way we describe Service Virtualization was really oriented toward the "Design Time" aspect of a development environment.

That is definitely a "development gap" that needs to be minded. When I read and hear articles about new development processes, it seems like there is a wide gap between the developer's code itself (addressed by Agile, scrum, source control, some ALM) that extends all the way through integration and testing, and continues until Deployment (where the software assets exist in Runtime).

As an industry, we look at Virtualization and Cloud as deployment frontiers. That's cool, but it represents a small portion of what could be done with the two technologies working together to eliminate that development gap, before we step off into it.  

We are increasingly finding that as development becomes more distributed across small teams and separate domains, the number of pre-production development servers and test beds balloons. Whether that deployed app is on a regular web server, or a Cloud-hosted VM, it still seems like we are leaving a bigger proliferation there. It might not seem that big at first, but few real enterprises haven't already started leveraging these distributed computing resources now.

If Cloud Computing and Virtualization are all about replicating or replacing production servers, then why would a top banking customer replicate more than 1100 services and systems with Virtual Services instead of letting them keep making copies of Virtual Machines (VMs) on their network, and later, in their private cloud solution?

Short of longing for the old days of monolithic, centrally controlled systems with 1 production environment and a couple test and staging environments... business won't let IT go back to slow releases - our agility is also creating a new burden in pre-production. Of course, this applies for larger enterprises - there are many instance of new companies who are building functionality "for the Cloud" that is limited in scope and integration requirements, starts fresh, and thus, does not have as much of a burden here.

So here's my question again: If you had to count up the instances of pre-production vs. production "environments" and servers, would the pre-prod outnumber the production by 10-1? 100-1? Be honest and think about all those dev and test servers you don't know enough about to shut down... and think about all the partners that must have their own as well.

And, mind the gap before you step off that platform!

Question: Are Pre-Prod Environments Balooning while Production Infrastructure Shrinks?

I recently posed a question to eBizQ and got some good answers, both reasonable and unexpected perspectives. See my eBizQ SOA forum question here: Are Servers Bloating in Pre-Production, but Shrinking in Production due to SOA?

K. Scott Morrison and Joe McKendrick discussed how Virtualization is a tester's best friend in reducing this phenomenon - and yes we have seen virtualization of hardware reducing some infrastructure needs. What about the ones you can't virtualize? I vote the best answer (received by 5:00PM CST) goes to Avi Rosenthal, whose comments highlight why this phenomenon is happening:

"In distributed Service Based, Virtualized and Cloud based environments the number of other environment servers is skyrocketing vs. the number of Production servers. This is true as well for virtualized server instances. The reason for that phenomenon is that Production environments are more controlled because no one can allow uncontrolled Production. The risks of non controlled Development or Test environments are less obvious. As the number of instances grows the number of servers in the non-controlled environments grows more rapidly than the number of servers included in the controlled environment. However, logically the number could be reduced at least to a ratio of 1:3 or 1:4 and not 1:20 if the non-Production environments will be managed and virtualized similar to the Production environment."

Really good point Avi.

However HP's Kelly Emo then came up with the gist of an issue I wanted to address further: the huge rift between measuring costs and effort for Production vs. Pre-production environments. It seems these activities are usually owned by two completely different departments and cost centers within the enterprise as she notes:

"In a majority of customers I speak with, their organization, culture and funding models are no where near having this happen... different silos are managing hardware and software resources and different SLAs are associated with them. In fact, in some cases, SOX compliance keeps organizations from being able to mix and mingle their networks and data between pre-production and operations. That said, I see one place where this can happen.. in the cloud..."

That's a next-generation view. Indeed the cloud is a big piece of the puzzle. However, many of the companies who get excited about the value of deployment savings using VMs and Cloud-based infrastructure to replace servers, simply do not have a reason to care about the number of groups maintaining and consuming dev, test and integration environments.

 The same goes vice-versa for pre-production - when you break up development into smaller, agile dev & test teams, those teams each provision and set up their own hardware and software environments in a largely unregulated fashion - and often find out that there are many dependencies they can't copy or replicate via conventional means. This leaves a lot of cost and effort unaccounted for in the wash of the software lifecycle, or as a cost of per-employee infrastructure or support.

You will see a lot more on this topic from us - while we aren't in the business of virtualizing servers and hardware, we are particularly curious about why companies aren't recognizing the value they get by optimizing Production vs. optimizing their infrastructure at every step along pre-production. Is a ballooning number of servers a side-effect of distributed, agile approaches, or is the symptom we are reporting simply a matter of perception? We'll keep you posted as we do more research in this area.

Thoughts from Gartner AADI 2009 Summit - SOA's still on.

I recently returned from the Gartner AADI conference in Las Vegas, and had the chance to enjoy dozens of good conversations with IT execs who were there primarily to explore strategies for the coming year. Some thoughts from the conference and sessions I was able to catch:

• Budget optimism... Overall it seemed that there was a guarded optimism for re-invigorated architecture and integration projects and budgets in 2010, many people said they were part of a new group or new reporting structure specifically tasked with defining a strategy.
• SOA Won't Die - in fact any lead architect or CIO I caught up with says they are quietly going about service-orientation and getting real value from it, even if it's not sexy anymore. After the age of boundless service proliferation earlier in the decade, it seems that much of the talk is now about authority - who owns and manages these services, and how are they compensated for doing so. Recently a lot of the "SOA elite" posted some good discussion on this topic (check out this eBizQ SOA forum here).
• Heterogeneity is king. The optimism for integration is tempered by a big dose of skepticism about "one stop shop" vendor claims - even more so than you normally hear from the analysts. Companies are dealing with the realities of multiple acquired systems from different vendors, and looking for ways to modernize their applications.
• People understand the distinction of service virtualization. Another pleasant surprise was the understanding shown for hardware/network virtualization vs. the practice of Service or behavioral virtualization of constrained assets that simply can't be captured or dropped on a VM. I believe the analyst community has talked to application layer customers about how these assets can be brought to bear earlier into the lifecycle, even if this practice doesn't exactly fit under defined research fields like software quality, app dev, virtualization and IT ops.
• Cloud Computing still uncommon in large-scale enterprises - There was a great deal of content about Cloud-based approaches at the summit, and it is certainly important to get some forward insight. In practical terms however I did not see these $500M+ company IT execs mention Cloud in their basket of must-do items for 2010, other than a notable exception of specifically wanting trading partners to use the Cloud more to ease cost and access issues. (This reminds me of public transportation, "it would be great if everyone else would do it to free up the road...") Certainly a lot of curiosity and predictions around this. I am sure at a less enterprise software heavy conference you would see more cloud practitioners and this will continue to grow.

In any case it was a productive time at Caesar's, and we will discuss some topics we touched on this week at a later time.

Webinar 10/27 w/Infosys & ITKO - Accelerating Modern Application Quality

You might say we are between a pillow and a hard place right now when it comes to modern applications. On one side, we have killer new development approaches such as service orientation, BPM, and SaaS that provide us with a much greater amount of flexibility and speed in assembling reusable components and services. Development time and costs have indeed gone down, while functionality gets ever more sophisticated.

However the unintended consequence of being able to build and change applications so quickly comes at a price. Testing and validating these systems has become harder than ever. So many interconnected, interdependent components means an exponential increase in potential points of failure, and an inability to have access to a stable and affordable test environment. So much so, that testing environment and error repair costs are outstripping development cost in many cases.

There's gotta be a way out of this situation. Fortunately, we have some experts ready to help shed some light on these new costs and track down the quality issues in modern applications. We are privileged to have our founder/"Chief Geek" John Michelsen, presenting with Infosys' head of Client Services, Aparna Sharma on this upcoming session:

Webinar with Infosys and iTKO: "Accelerating Modern Application Quality: Testing Strategies for Reducing Risk and Cost in Today's Distributed Application Environment"
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 – 1:00 PM Eastern (US) Time

Between these two, you have a great deal of experience leading and advising test and development teams in hundreds of engagements with the most complex types of software environments. So I expect nothing less than finding out what works today (and what didn't work) for real enterprises. After all, time-to-market is measured by delivery success, not the rate at which developers can string together new (but untested) functionality.  Hope to see you there, and bring your questions!

What are Modern Applications Anyway, and Why Do We Care?

You may have noticed lately that a new terminology has surfaced in the way we talk about testing, validating and virtualizing software architectures of a certain type: Modern Applications. Most recently it was used in our release on the HP / iTKO agreement, and you can also see it now on our website. So why is this distinction important?

Understandably, the first thing that may spring to mind with "Modern Apps" is an architecture akin to a Mondrian compartmentalized painting, or maybe some kind of new wave synth music. However, the use of "Modern" makes a lot of sense in encompassing several commonalities inherent in today's enterprise software, without requiring adherence to a specific architectural approach such as SOA.

In short, "Modern Applications" are today's class of distributed, multi-tier, object-based, flexibly assembled software architectures, used to support complex business workflows. Modern applications may include all of the above technologies or architectures (SOA, REST, BPM, Virtualization, MDM, Cloud Computing, SaaS, what have you). While that sounds very general, that defines the kind of software we see getting put in place in most leading enterprises today. We are seeing analyst traction in this sense too, for the natural result of "legacy modernization" should, by rights, lead to "modern applications."

A couple days ago we had a live webinar with Perficient's chief technologist and SOA blogger Eric Roch - and we started with SOA but quickly migrated to other integration platforms, the use of Service Virtualization and Data Management which are very different from SOA, and there are many other aspects of Modern Apps that are not relevant to SOA. (You can watch a WebEx archive of the 9/26 webinar with iTKO and Perficient here.) Eric recently wrote about this in his blog: "Do We Need more than SOA for a Modern Application Architecture?" as well:

"While SOA is certainly a big part of the solution, a total modern architecture also includes leveraging business process management (BPM), data management and Web 2.0 technologies. SOA alone does not implicitly improve governance, IT strategy or business alignment, and top-down, strategic SOA has been largely disappointing."

We definitely agree. What is relevant is that this category of applications are pulled into an environment where they are built, leveraged and shared among multiple development teams and business partners - Modern Applications are not "stovepipe" architectures designed and built by a single team with a rigid set of protocols. Modern Apps are the kinds of flexibly assembled, agile software structures that modern businesses demand, in order to be competitive.

SOA, even if the term fades away, would be considered modern as a model for designing and building applications. However SOA alone leaves out a lot of other strategic and technology advances we are seeing in today's enterprise. We hope this explains our use of this admittedly broad term adequately. Your thoughts on this topic welcome!

Webinar 9/23 with Perficient's Eric Roch: Addressing SOA Quality Gaps

Many of our initial customer discussions focus on assessing the "health" of your SOA and Integration efforts. How do you measure health in the distributed software applications like we see in every major enterprise? It's not just about measuring application performance and response time.

There are many details such as functional accuracy, time per release, and availability for testing that directly impact how healthy the IT environment will remain over time.

You may remember last year's blockbuster "ESB-Test-Fest" webinar with a leader from one of our key integration partner leaders and the author of "The SOA Blog," Perficient's Chief Technologist Eric Roch. Well now we have another one coming up that takes the next step into testing and validating the entire SOA application lifecycle with Eric and iTKO's co-Founder and CTO Ruston Vickers - two guys with as much practice experience solving the deepest integration quality challenges as you'll find.

Webinar: "Overcoming SOA Integration Testing Challenges and Other Critical Gaps to SOA Quality and Efficiency" on iTKO.com

September 23, 2009 - 1:00-2:00 PM Central
with Eric Roch, Chief Technologist, Perficient, and Ruston Vickers, CTO & Founder, iTKO.

Bring along your questions to this one-hour session and hope to see you there.

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.

eBizQ discussion: Are we Meaningfully Applying SOA Governance?

Editor of eBizQ Peter Schooff recently asked a small group of us pundits to post questions to their new expert Forum site, and this week he ran a question from me that we've been asking our customers: Are we meaningfully Applying SOA Governance?

"While we've seen a large number of firms realizing significant value from SOA approaches, are companies truly leveraging SOA Governance principles across their entire design, development and delivery lifecycle? Are solutions such as Service Management, UDDI Registry/Repositories, Testing and Validation being employed as part of this effort? How can SOA Governance accomplish greater adoption levels in today's enterprise environments?"

Our friend Miko Matsumura from Software AG said a resounding yes, and chalks success up to behavioral change and not tooling: "Today, the 'install software and it just works' concept is all but moot. Despite the desire of software that 'just works', the value obtained by software is pretty much only attainable when the organization changes its behavior, for example in a business process."

Author Michael Poulin chimed in and extended the business responsibility aspect, while cautioning that any organization leveraging the tools before the principles has already lost. Fair point, and one reinforced by Joe McKendrick later in the column.

JP Morgenthal also noted from a technology perspective: "I believe a lot of implementations give 'lip service"' to governance and will implement the registry as part of the ESB support requirements, but do not have a plan for how to move beyond this phase of implementation." This is very much in line with what we've seen. Perhaps this will be the year people start utilizing these tools hand in hand.

This particular topic has been ongoing for some time here (see our blog post from a couple years ago on "Wringing Value out of UDDI Enforcement and Policy" or click on our SOA Governance category). We often find that without disciplined practices, and without a proper means of validation and enforcement of the Policies defined in a Registry/Repository or Service Management solution, the SOA Governance initiative faces some challenges.

In any case I am really enjoying the caliber of these ongoing discussions, and look for us to comment more when interesting topics come up.

Is SOA Governance Becoming a Silo Unto Itself?

A colleague recently passed me an article from Joe McKendrick, "Is SOA governance also its own silo?" that really got me thinking. If SOA governance is a software development activity, does it become a self-defeating initiative?

In the post, Joe cites an Ovum analyst and blogger we've followed for some time, Tony Baer: "There are various issues at work with SOA governance silos, Tony said in the Ovum report. First, there's a perception that SOA-based technology is "reserved for elite practitioners." Of course, relegating SOA to an elite group "compounds the waste and duplication that SOAs were supposed to avoid."

The threat of Vendor-based SOA is well known - basically locking you into one technology stack isn't a SOA approach by definition. But neither is the reaction of having a SOA Governance strategy assembled strictly by a star chamber of developers within the company.

What is ironic here is that the very concept of SOA Governance is to accommodate federated authority, loose coupling and flexible assembly of technologies around business needs. If indeed the concepts and tools required for SOA Governance become so specialized or complex that only a certain class of technologists can use (or reuse) them, instead of the business subject matter experts, we are inherently missing the boat.

This has been one of the biggest questions we ask ourselves as an organization -- "Am I doing everything in my power to make ensuring quality and agility as approachable for the customer as possible?" We hope all vendors and services firms involved in SOA consider this line of reasoning. Specialist IT teams, if put into a [[SOA Governance Silo]] will be increasingly stretched and understaffed, plus the farther removed they are from the business, the more they will take a technology-first approach to governance (what are my tools, what WS* protocols, etc.), and limit the business value they can deliver over the long term.

Webinar 6/18: Automated ALM & Dynamic SQA with iTKO & Forrester's Visitacion

Wanted: A way to tie together the software delivery advantages of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), with Dynamic SQA, which provides the in-depth quality coverage required for today's complex and constantly changing enterprise apps. What practices and tools are required to make this connection happen?

We are excited about an upcoming webinar on Integration Developer News that should amply address both. iTKO Founder/Chief Geek John Michelsen is joined by Forrester VP Margo Visitacion, a leading expert in ALM and Software Quality. Ensuring predictable results and on-time delivery of enterprise software requires testing, validation and virtualization across a myriad of changing technologies and services. Customer examples and current methodologies will be explored.

Here's the official description and signup link:

iTKO and Forrester Webinar 6/18: "Removing ALM Obstacles for Greater Agility, Cost Savings, and Lower Risk"
Experts from iTKO and Forrester Research present trends / technologies behind automated testing and validation to streamline ALM for higher productivity, accuracy and agility. Attend and Learn how Testing, Validation and Virtualization are being employed to support the best practices of Dynamic SQA (Software Quality Assurance). With with strong Dynamic SQA in place, enterprise IT teams are poised to deliver predictability, patterns and reuse to better manage complex software projects.

Our last webinar on SOA and Integration Efficiency (view archive) had more than 500 attendees, and lots of great questions we were happy to address (either on the session or afterward). We hope you will join us for this one!

Butler Group Conducts Independent Audit of iTKO

The Butler Group, a UK-based IT analyst firm, recently completed a third-party technology audit on the LISA product suite v4.6. The audit is fairly broad as it covers product functionality, operation, and deployment along with commentary on product strategy and future directions.

Butler Group technology audits are free to their members, however we paid a fee enabling us to have limited distribution rights. You can download a copy on our site: see - Butler Group View - LISA 4.6 Technology Audit. Although we paid a fee, Butler Group performed the audit objectively and authored the content.

Butler Group is the IT End User division of Datamonitor and is a leading provider of Information Technology research, analysis, and advice. Founded in 1990, Butler Group is respected for the impartiality and incisiveness of its research and opinion. We are pleased to offer this report. Here is the abstract:

The iTKO LISA Suite, comprising LISA Test, LISA Validate, and LISA Virtualize, provides capabilities around testing, validation, and simulation of services in a distributed, multi-tier, component-based infrastructure. The code-free nature of the solution enables QA teams and developers to easily conduct unit, functional, regression, and load testing in test environments consisting of either live deployed services, or services that are unavailable or yet to be built. These tests can be performed in a simulated virtual environment that mirrors the behaviors and capabilities of an actual production environment. LISA is capable of running tests and tracking metrics at multiple underlying technology layers (for example, the Web UI level, data integration level, ESB messaging layer, Java objects/EJB and so on). The solution is targeted at Global 2000 organizations with significant investments in SOA, BPM, integration suites, ESBs, or any component-based architecture, looking to streamline their test and development processes for composite applications.

If you would like to see the entire report, it is available at Butler Group View - LISA 4.6 Technology Audit.

Darwin’s Take on Application Developers

Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago on February 12. It took a while for his ideas to take effect, but they are pervasive now. Darwin wrote way before computers but as Mike Gualtieri of Forrester recently wrote, his ideas on "survival of the fittest is an elegant explanation of why so many species exist, why some become extinct, and why some flourish."

Mike recently reflected on what Darwin might say about application developers. He wrote that, "as long as developers continue to write billions of lines of code, they are not going the way of the dinosaurs or the buggy whip manufacturers anytime soon." However, there is a caveat to this. Mike quoted Darwin on the secret to application developers' success. "It is not the strongest of species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to change."

IT is a field of constant change so successful application developers are those that follow Darwin's pronouncements. Agile and SOA are two of those changes in paradigms that require nimble thinking. Success involves moving off of old ways to fully embrace all aspects of the new approaches. A (belated) Happy birthday Charles Darwin. (Photo above by ChrisL_AK under Creative Commons).

Q&A with Butler Group's Rob Hailstone

We recently had an extensive briefing and demonstration process with UK-based analyst firm Butler Group's Rob Hailstone - Practice Director, Software Infrastructure, and his team, the result of which is their independent Technology Audit report covering iTKO. We paid for download rights to this analyst document for limited time from our site, and we'll cover the report in a future post.

So after much scrutiny of iTKO's LISA product on their part, I decided to turn the microphone around, and had some Q&A questions for Rob, which I think provide some insight into his perspective on the enterprise software space.

Q: With economic pressure to optimize IT greater than ever, what issues are currently "top of mind" for your practice right now?

RH: My own practice area focuses on SOA. The most immediate impact of the global economic downturn is that organisations that don’t have a really concrete plan for how SOA is going to benefit the business are suspending or abandoning those plans. This is a good thing. Business benefits don’t automatically follow the deployment of SOA, they have to be targeted and worked towards. It is now more important than ever to understand exactly what has to be delivered in order to justify the cost of SOA deployment.

Q: What are your thoughts on the rate of innovation going on today in fields such as virtualization and cloud computing in the enterprise?

RH: Virtualisation has been central to IT ever since the first multi-tasking machines, but the apparent commoditisation of IT hardware caused us to lose focus. We are now much more aware of all the peripheral costs, such as management, power, floor space, etc., and it is obvious that the requirement for virtualisation has never really gone away.

Cloud has a different set of considerations. Some CIOs that will happily embrace virtualisation will think long and hard before relinquishing their physical resources. Cloud provides a great way for packaged application vendors to deliver the application as a service without having to make the heavy investment in scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure, and it also makes a lot of sense for smaller organisations who need cost-effective off-site backup or a full application platform. However, organisations with an established IT infrastructure that might look to the cloud as a top-up computing capability will probably find the cost of effectively managing a hybrid environment too high in the immediate future.

Q: You've conducted a number of Technology Audits with Butler. How do customers best leverage these documents?

RH: The obvious and most frequent use of Technology Audits is to provide enough information so that a subscriber can decide whether to include a particular product on an evaluation shortlist. They are also used as a reality check on a particular type of strategy to establish whether there is sufficient supporting technology in place to be worth persevering with a more detailed investigation. We try to ensure that we point out where a particular product is not likely to be appropriate as well as showing its strengths.

Q. Any other thoughts in terms of this report?

RH: SOA is all about enabling a higher rate of change, but just putting the architecture in place without the control mechanisms will ultimately lead to chaos. Implementing a change management process backed up with a sound set of testing technologies is an important part of building for long-term success with SOA.

Thanks for letting me ask some questions, Rob, and we had fun digging deep into LISA for the audit.

The Cloud Will Grow in 2009 - IDC

What IT sector goes up in an economic down turn? IDC answers the question with this report, Software as a Service Market Will Expand Rather than Contract Despite the Economic Crisis, IDC Finds.

Cloud Computing would have grown in a good economic environment - but this continued growth is a sign of the times. The cloud is good news for companies seeking faster ways to turn on revenue-generating functionality and save up-front costs.

Highlights of the report include:
1. By the end of 2009, 76% of U.S. organizations will have at least one SaaS-delivered application.
2. The percentage of U.S. firms that plan to spend at least 25% of their IT budgets on SaaS applications will increase from 23% in 2008 to nearly 45% in 2010.
3. This market's growth prospects will accelerate the shift to SaaS for the whole value chain as the promise of a recurring revenue stream, and the opportunity to tap OPEX and project-related dollars, will benefit the whole SaaS ecosystem.

These projections for the growth of the cloud are also consistent with our experiences with SaaS’s cousin, SOA. The cloud won't make complexity and risk go away, even if it seems to obscure much of the initial setup effort for end customers.

As companies increasingly rely on the cloud to support business processes, the interactions shared among multiple new services will need to be tested and validated. Per-use service costs and availability will also create significant constraints, and the need for service virtualization will become evident as a means of getting the best of the cloud while eliminating cloud dependencies.

SOA has been around longer than SaaS and is running ahead of it on the Gartner hype curve (See Will SOA Fold into SaaS? Will Quality Happen Along the Way? As I wrote then, one obstacle for the pure plays in the cloud to join SOA in the Gartner slope of enlightenment is to recognize and deal with the increased testing and validation of data from even more diverse sources, as well as the governance and validation of all the underlying technologies that contribute to specific business outcomes.

Podcast: Talking SOA & Virtualization futures with Peter Schooff at Gartner AADI

Last week I had the chance to catch up with eBizQ's Managing Editor Peter Schooff at the Gartner AADI conference in Las Vegas. Amidst the hubbub on the floor he taped this brief interview - take a listen:

http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/2008/12/beyond_testing_to_validation_l.php

The talk ranges from our SOA Test, Validate, Virtualize, to newer expansion of our capabilities into LISA Pathfinder and Data Management features over the coming releases.

Overall observations from the show? I'm glad I attended - the quality of the discussions was stronger than ever. And - even though the economy is tough and attendance at physical tradeshows is down, this particular conference was full of execs and technical leads who have critical business needs - as in, how do I eliminate costs and constraints from IT - that they need to solve NOW. Thanks to all the customers and analysts we had the chance to talk to there and all the best facing next year's challenges.