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.

ITKO retrospective with John & Shridhar in D Magazine

ITKO's own John Michelsen and Shridhar Mittal recently appeared at a Dallas-area business forum to share their unique experience of building a little private software firm into a global software player, and writer Glenn Hunter from D Magazine's CEO business publication was there. Read this interesting personality piece here:

D CEO Magazine: The Triumph of LISA
iTKO scores with a revolutionary software product, thanks to the geek who invented it and a CEO who knew how to grow.

It has been an incredible ride -  less than 6 years from initial funding to reshaping the application development market with Service Virtualization innovations, and then becoming a strategic part of a leading software company like CA Technologies. But this story is far from over...

[link:] http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/D_CEO/2012/January_February/iTKO_the_Triumph_of_Lisa_Software.aspx

Emergency Alert Message: Seek a Virtual Environment Immediately!

Did you hear about yesterday's "Government Alert" test message broadcasted to Verizon mobile subscribers in New Jersey and other Eastern US states? The message said:

"CMAS Alert - Civil Emergency in this area until 1:24 PM EST Take Shelter Now U.S. Govern." (story in NJ.com)

Thousands of panicked callers immediately flooded 911 lines wondering what went wrong, and where the "Take Shelter" should happen. State Police and the NJ branch of Department of Homeland Security were on the case. As it turns out, the company apologized later that the message was just a test the carrier was running to verify their participation in the government's CMAS, or Commercial Mobile Alert System.

Events like this are a ringing endorsement for the practice of Service Virtualization - coupled with a solution like LISA that could have been used to simulate the back-end systems, the message relay, or any number of end-user phones receiving the message -- so Verizon could complete their development and test cycles. Outside of the constraints of limited access time to live systems, and the high costs of securing or replicating solid test infrastructure and data, there is a brimming risk factor for end customers.

Testing your software against (or anywhere near) the live system is inherently volatile and risky. One wrong destination address left in the code, one unauthorized data change executed by developers, can generate very troublesome results indeed. The ability to message everyone with an alert only works if we can be assured that the message is real. We hope these teams make the call to decouple themselves from live systems and customers, and immediately start testing them in a virtual service environment.

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

CA World 2011: ITKO Takes Application Lifecycles Skyward Nov. 13-16

We are looking ahead to the must-attend IT event of the year for any enterprise concerned with delivering faster to meet customer demands. CA World 2011 in Las Vegas promises to be loaded with a complete raft of content covering every aspect of optimizing IT infrastructure, and especially composite and Cloud-based applications, where our LISA suite is an integral part of a new set of CA capabilities that will make "agility take flight" for application lifecycles - accelerating time-to-market for critical IT services at lower cost and risk.

CA World 2011 - Mandalay Bay Resort, Las Vegas, NV - November 13-16, 2011. [Register here.]

Come fly with ITKO at this event - we will be presenting throughout CA World with a complete track. We are presenting more than 8 breakout and customer sessions, 6 demo kiosks, a hands-on lab and much more, including a very cool interactive exhibit area, and opportunities to network with IT leaders from peer customers, ITKO executives and CA solution experts every day of the event.

To find our sessions, we recommend going to the Agenda Builder in the CAWorld site, and typing "ITKO" in the Search. Look for us in these sessions:

• ITKO Introduction: Where Agility Takes Flight - Lifecycle Optimization with CA LISA - Presenter: John Michelsen, Chief Geek & Founder, ITKO
• ITKO Tech Session: Service Virtualization – Driving Performance Before and After Release - Presenter: Ruston Vickers, CTO & Founder, ITKO
• ITKO Lab: Collaborative Defect Resolution with CA LISA - Presenter: Chris Kraus, LISA Product Manager, ITKO
• ITKO Customer Session: Agile Enterprise Delivery with LISA – Faster, Better, Cheaper - Leading LISA Customers with Moderator: Robert Humphrey, EVP Marketing, ITKO
• ITKO Best Practices & Analyst Session on Cloud Labs with voke: Develop & Test in the Cloud with Lifecycle Virtualization - Speakers: Theresa Lanowitz, principal analyst, voke; with John Michelsen, Chief Geek, ITKO
• ITKO Partner Session: Delivering Application Virtualization and Cloud Labs for Agility and Cost Savings with IBM - Speaker: Nick Carnovale, Partner Application Management Services, IBM (Intro by Shridhar Mittal, GM, ITKO)

We're serious about making your application lifecycles take flight, but we're having fun too! Once you’re here, come to ITKO Booth #250 in the EXPO, get your “ticket to ride” in our helicopter (a real FAA simulator!) and your pass to our VIP ITKO Customer Reception Monday night.

Look for more updates here and on other leading CA blogs like Service Assurance Daily on what we'll be doing at CA World 2011.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News: CA Technologies Acquires ITKO

It's official: CA Technologies has completed its acquisition of ITKO. Read the official press release on CA.com here:

CA Technologies Completes Acquisitions of Interactive TKO and Watchmouse B.V.

Companies Expand Options for Helping Enterprises and Service Providers Address the Complexity of ‘Cloud Choice’

This announcement marks the end of one incredible journey for ITKO to achieve adoption in many of the world's leading IT-oriented enterprises, and the beginning of another. As a team, expect us to continue to deliver new aspects of the LISA solutions we innovated over the last few years -- Service Virtualization, Collaborative Defect Resolution and DevTest Cloud.

We remain ITKO. But now, with the strength and product portfolio of CA's IT lifecycle supporting us, expect ITKO to offer an even greater level of reach and service to global customers.

 

 

News Today: CA Technologies to Acquire Privately Held ITKO for $330 Million in Cash

Things are heating up here in Plano, TX. And I'm not talking about another 100-degree summer day: ITKO has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by CA Technologies.

Read the full press release here: "CA Technologies to Acquire Privately Held ITKO for $330 Million in Cash"

This is great news for our customers, partners and employees. At ITKO we have long believed maintaining a vendor-neutral approach is a requirement of any large-scale, heterogeneous enterprise IT environment, and CA Technologies shares our vision of supporting “any application, any technology.”

After hundreds of customer engagements over the last 5 years, we've learned our LISA suite, and our capabilities for Service Virtualization are most effective when used to eliminate the most difficult and costly constraints, and solve the world's most complex development, testing and integration challenges. With CA, we are now part of an organization with the reach and capabilities to truly solve the biggest problems enterprise IT faces.

Conveniently, we have seen many of our large enterprise customers also running CA's Application Performance Management (APM) solutions such as Wily Introscope and Net QoS to assure higher service and performance levels amid changing conditions. These joint customers are tackling large scale modernization and migration projects, and seeking new ways to move their applications to the Cloud with less risk.

You can still call us ITKO, and our team will continue to support customers with the service and strategic approach we're known for. But the overall picture of what customers can do to optimize the entire IT life cycle will get a whole lot bigger.

There are many more synergies and advantages to be realized from today's announcement, so look for future posts here on this blog (itko category: "CA") as well as reading pertinent articles on CA's very useful blog "Service Assurance Daily" over the coming weeks.

News: iTKO Announces Robert Humphrey as Chief Marketing Officer

DALLAS, TX - April 6, 2011 – iTKO, the leading provider of enterprise application virtualization and optimization solutions, today announced that Robert Humphrey has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer.  Mr. Humphrey will lead iTKO’s worldwide marketing organization, drawing upon his extensive track record and prior experience in both sales and marketing leadership roles in high tech companies.

“iTKO’s virtualization offerings for test, validation and application development are delivering incredible results for our customers,” said Shridhar Mittal, iTKO’s CEO. “Our customers are telling us that with iTKO’s LISA, they are finally able to eliminate risks and deliver faster on application development goals. Robert is the perfect executive to help us take this leadership to a broader audience, to better establish the market and iTKO’s brand awareness within it. His experience and background are a tremendous complement to our management team.”

Mr. Humphrey has held a wide range of executive management positions in high growth technology organizations. He joins iTKO from Infor Global Solutions where he was Chief Marketing Officer of that $2 billion enterprise software company. Prior to that at McAfee, he held the position of Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Marketing, where he led that company’s transition to leadership in the enterprise security marketplace.

Humphrey began his career in technology at Unisys Corporation where he spent 9 years in a variety of sales and sales leadership roles. He then helped The Strifler Group grow over 400% in less than 2 years. At i2 Technologies, he served as its Senior Vice President and led i2’s Marketing and Alliances during that company’s explosive growth from $20 Million in revenue to over $1 Billion in approximately five years. At venture capital firm Insight Capital Partners, Humphrey served as Venture Partner assisting portfolio companies in the areas of sales and marketing. He also served as Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer of Citadel Security Software until it was acquired by McAfee. 

“Customer success is the key to success for any technology company, and the results I’ve seen produced across the software lifecycle at iTKO’s customer sites are astounding,” said Robert Humphrey, iTKO’s CMO. “Our LISA solution is the best kept secret in the software industry, with an engaged user base that includes a ‘who’s who’ of the world’s biggest financial institutions, retailers, telecomm companies, health care companies and government institutions.”

“I’ve had the good fortune to be a part of some great growth businesses in my career, and iTKO is uniquely positioned with innovative products, a productive partner ecosystem, and a talented team needed for impressive growth. I am excited to be part of this opportunity to drive real value and innovation for our customers.”

Read the full press release on iTKO.com.

DevTest Cloud and LISA Service Virtualization: The Commercial

You may have read our book (well, a long paper) on SV and DevTest Cloud, or even seen the webinar we put on. But what about the commercial? Here at iTKO, promotion follows product, so here is your first peek at the new :60 spot for "Initiate the DevTest Cloud":

 

Stay tuned for even more killer video from the new iTKO-TV studios in Plano, which is to Dallas as Burbank is to LA. Which is to say it is mostly an endless expanse of malls and suburbs with some TV guys in it, but our new location is a great place to program -- and produce programming.

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.

Bridging the Cloud Divide with Development & Test Platforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. 52% of IT managers fear job losses

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

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

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

4. Mature adopters of cloud are already virtualizing.

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

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

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

iTKO News: Record Results for 2010

Here's a break in our editorial technology discussion for an official news wire from iTKO Corporate:

iTKO Completes 2010 with Record Growth and Profitability

DALLAS, TX, January 26, 2011 (Business Wire) -- iTKO, the leading provider of virtualization, test, and validation solutions for composite and cloud-based applications, today announced record results for calendar year 2010. iTKO delivered calendar year results of 109% year-over-year revenue growth and 39% after tax profit margin, while increasing its cash position by 149%. The company added a significant number of Global 2000 enterprise customers in 2010 and saw a sharp increase in the number of seven-figure enterprise license contracts. Using iTKO's LISA solutions, customers can rapidly deploy virtual service environments, cloud labs and continuous automated testing to eliminate constraints, improve performance and drastically reduce time and costs for complex enterprise applications. The company finished the second half of 2010 with a revenue run rate increase of over 150%.

Indeed, 2010 was an interesting growth year for iTKO, and while we are very happy about our financial results above, and expanding our business into new regions, we also think we are seeing bigger market forces at work here that are helping us along.

Fundamentally, we are seeing a huge shift appearing among large enterprises that rely on IT for a large portion of their business toward genuinely embracing distributed integration approaches: employing both rich UIs and services, atop messaging frameworks and platforms, and leveraging third party SaaS and Cloud-based services to do a lot of the back-end work.

All this has increased the flexibility and agility of software development, but it has at the same time drastically increased the volatility and risk of costly failures in production. Companies that do not address these IT risks with methods and tools up to the task of today's complex architectures will fail in front of customers.

Why was 2010 a tipping point for many of these enterprises? A tougher economy created tougher competition - so getting to market with new functionality and higher performance became critical to capturing and retaining customers. And continuing to "patch over" all those integration issues by throwing more testers and developers at the problem eventually became impossible - there are just too many potential problems to continue to catch and repair manually in today's complex architectures. Too many constraints and changes in the environment that bog down the efforts of multiple teams and business partners, all trying to work in sync on their own piece of an extended application.

Whatever the root causes, we are thankful for each new and returning customer who believed in iTKO's vision, and helped us realize our goals this year. We are committed to your continued success in reshaping application development - so you can get to market faster, with richer functionality and higher performance, at lower cost and risk.

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.

 

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.

Speaking of Cloud: Webinar 11/10 and Cloud Expo 2010 Sessions

This is not just a big week for political pundits - it's a huge one for technology pundits, and the topic of hype and speculation is, of course, Cloud.

We're heading out to the Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara today, where we are hoping to hear less hype, and more about companies getting down to practical value with Cloud. I'll be back to my roots meeting people on the show floor, and iTKO's Chief Geek/Founder John Michelsen will be making three appearances at the convention on Tuesday, Nov 2.

  John's appearances at Sys-Con Cloud Expo 2010:

1. Breakout Session: Tues 11/2 - 9:55-10:40 AM: "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Cloud Applications"
   What is preventing enterprises from realizing the elasticity and cost savings expected from Cloud applications? Successfully delivering complex apps in distributed Cloud environments requires a means for dealing with the constraints of systems and services that are unavailable to development and testing teams. The DevTest Cloud is an essential platform that provides the ability to provision development and test labs, consisting of Virtual Machines (VMs), Virtual Service Environments, and automated regression and performance test servers in the Cloud.
2. Demo Session: Tues 11/2 - 5:00 - 5:20 PM: A product demonstration of LISA DevTest Cloud Manager (DCM) for provisioning elastic, on-demand virtual testing and development environments.
3. CTO Power Panel: Tues 11/2 - 7:15-7:45 PM: John joins other Cloud development leaders in this CTO-only panel in the general session room.

All of this activity leads up to a DevTest Cloud webinar we are putting on next week:

iTKO Webinar: What Makes a DevTest Cloud Fly? (And what is the value?)
November 10, 2010 1:00pm - 2:00pm Central

So your company is moving its software development and integration activities to the DevTest Cloud. What are some of the new practices you should expect to be able to do in this environment, and what are other companies doing successfully right now? The DevTest Cloud is an essential platform that provides the ability to provision enterprise development and test labs, consisting of Virtual Machines (VMs), Virtual Service Environments, and automated regression and performance test servers in the Cloud. Examples of utilizing DevTest Cloud for performance tuning, regression testing and continuous integration will be covered in this insightful session.

A DevTest Cloud provides an essential platform for enterprise software development and testing. Whether the Cloud infrastructure consists of pooled on-premise computing resources, or public Cloud capacity that is provisioned as needed, the end result is the truly on-demand, elastic capacity we expected from the Cloud, at a fraction of the cost of dealing with the hard constraints of traditional dev and test environments.

Registration is open to iTKO LISA customers and subscribers. Sign up here and we’ll send you the meeting information: http://www.itko.com/resources/webinar_devtestcloud_nov2010.jsp

Stay tuned for more updates from iTKO at the Cloud Expo.

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.

Now Hiring at iTKO - Job Update

This is just a quick update of some available job postings at iTKO - we are continuing to grow to meet customer needs. If you know someone who is truly motivated and exceptional, and looking for an exciting career path at a company on the cutting edge, refer them to us. Here's the available positions right now:

• Senior Technical Writer 
• Technical Writer
• Senior Quality Engineer
• Solution Architect - Presales
• Professional Services - Consulting
• Senior Support Engineer

If one of the roles above is a fit, candidates can email their resume/CV to jobs [at] itko.com. No third party referrals, vendors or recruiting firms, please.

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."

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.

iTKO Releases LISA 5

Big news this month for iTKO, not the least of which -- perhaps the biggest growth spurt our LISA Suite has had so far. LISA 5.0 contains more new features than any major release we've put out, and that makes sense, since many of the elements contained in today's LISA were more than 2 years in the making, both through development and extensibility in the field to meet new challenges.

Read the press release here:

"LISA 5.0 Product Release Extends iTKO's Position as Market Leader and Innovator with Powerful Virtualization, Test Data Automation, and Defect Collaboration"

Look for a LISA perspective and retrospective on this blog soon from iTKO's John Michelsen, as well as more discussion on how customers are applying new enhancements and features such as Virtual Service Management, Personal VSE, Test Data Automation and Pathfinder Pro.

MicroFocus Picks Up Former Heavyweight Borland for a Buck a Share

As reported in the tech news, (ex. Former heavyweight Borland bought by Micro Focus) “The Austin, Texas-based software maker said Wednesday that it has agreed to be acquired in its entirety by Micro Focus International in a $75 million cash transaction, unanimously approved by the boards of both companies.”

Borland last described itself as "the application lifecycle management company." It has been struggling and lost a key turnaround player when former CEO Tod Nielsen dropped off early this year to become VMWare's new CEO. Their glory days were mostly pre-web and some products lost out to Open Source upstarts.

cNet said that Micro Focus will acquire each outstanding share of Borland common stock for $1 per share. That sounds cheap even for a former legend in software development circles, but it's a “premium of 25 percent over the closing share price of 80 cents on May 5, and a premium of approximately 67 percent over the average 30-day closing price of 60 cents.”

Micro Focus is an enterprise software management company with a good international presence, and they also rolled in some of the quality and development management tools of Compuware into their portfolio at the same time. It hopes the Borland acquisition to help it gain greater market share, increase its customer base, and capture a larger penetration of the U.S. technology market.

The news did not say if the Borland name is going to be retained. Borland itself tried a rebranding from 1998 to 2000 using the name of "Inprise" before reverting to Borland for its greater name recognition. They also bought one of the original software testing companies, Segue, for $100M back in 2006, as they attempted to migrate from being a development tools provider, to a "software delivery optimization" vendor.

Another interesting year for acquisitions happening here. We certainly don't see the consolidation of established tech vendors slowing down any time soon.

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."

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

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

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

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

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

Virtual SOA Gov Conference September 24

This full day virtual SOA conference will cover the full range of governance issues and solutions including IT governance, SOA governance, data governance, registries, repositories, and run-time service governance. We are pleased that ITKO’s John Michelsen will be part of a Panel Discussion: "SOA Governance and IT Governance" at 12pm EDT. The complete panel includes Anne Thomas Manes, Ronald Schmelzer, Frank Martinez, David Bressler, Ed Horst, and Joe McKendrick.

We have already had some very interesting briefings and discussions with this group of analysts and industry peers. If you have any questions about SOA Governance, Policy design and enforcement, Agility, quality or management of Virtualized Services, this would be a great time to ask them.

There is more detail on the panel members, the other events, and the ability to register for the free event at the virtual SOA Conference site. Some iTKOers will also be manning a virtual iTKO LISA booth on the virtual Expo, to answer any followup questions in a more relaxed environment, or supply whitepapers and other downloads.

*Note: the SOA Gov e-Conference is now available post-event in Archive form at the link above.

New Paper on SOA Design & Validation Out from Linthicum

Our previous post referred to a paper that SOA analysts ZapThink just put out by David Linthicum. The paper (or "manual") is now downloadable from iTKO for free as well as from ZapThink .

Now, if you read last week's flurry of blogs and posts with Dave and John, et.al. about whether ESB is the bane of SOA, that is a philosophical question that makes you wonder if we see eye-to-eye with him -- but you need to vet out those kinds of practices in discussions to get to useful advice. That dialogue is what we love about blogging. We were talking about the challenges of leveraging multiple ESBs that will never go away in the largest companies and multi-vendor relationships, while Dave was simply stating that wouldn't be a best practice if you had a choice.

The manual/whitepaper: "Design & Validation in a Heterogeneous SOA" sounds like a mouthful but I found the content to be quite a good primer on service composition, and some of the ground rules to consider before using, or reusing, any particular piece of technology. Both SOA architects and the business stakeholders that are driving the practice should at least have a level set of what they are trying to accomplish, BEFORE talking shop about the merits of specific technology.

We couldn't agree more with this direction... it offers a good primer for teams who are growing their skills in SOA architecture or governance practices. Don't get locked in to one notion of SOA by a vendor or specific technology -- first compose and design around the business, plan to validate your approach as early as possible and test throughout the process, THEN rationalize what to service-enable or buy just what you really need for development and integration.

If you read this one, let us know what you "zap" think of it!

Progress buys Mindreef: More SOA vendor consolidation?

If you are tracking the SOA vendors, you probably recently heard about Progress Software buying Mindreef (right after picking up IONA the day before as well). So let's take a minute to talk about iTKO's own view of the rapid moves and what it means for the market for software companies like us who are committed to making SOA a reality.

 

Clear message: SOAP testing isn't SOA testing

In one sense this represents consolidation, true, but in another sense, this proves that focusing on testing a single technology, such as web services doesn't provide enough coverage for the kinds of heterogeneous technologies that are inherent in today's SOA architectures, at least not enough for a company to survive on WSDL/SOAP testing alone. Mindreef was early to the market with web services testing, but over the past 5 years, we've seen that for every major enterprise, you also need to test different flavors of ESB, rich Web apps/RIAs, databases, EJB, CORBA, etc.

Dana Gardner blogged on the details of this acquisition recently, and talked a bit about his view of Mindreef in the light of WS-* testing alone:

"I took my first briefing with Mindreef, given their neighborly proximity, about three years ago. The seasoned team had a hit on their hands with SOAPscope, and their timing in the SOA market was great. But I’m not sure the company grew as was hoped, and perhaps the fast evolution of SOA beyond a WS-* emphasis played a role. SOAP hasn’t blossomed to quite the degree some people had forecast."

In fact we have always asserted that SOA Testing isn't a viable space on its own, unless it is tied in with Integration, Governance and Virtualization practices. So this kind of endgame is no different than what we've seen with Solstice for instance (which specialized in functionally testing webMethods ESB only), going to GreenHat (which tests TIBCO ESB); or Agitar (which bet on automating Java developer unit tests only) winding down operations. You need to be able to test and validate across every stage of the software lifecycle, and have the integrations and access in place to do so, across every technology layer to keep the lights blinking for critical SOA applications.

As SOA expert Joe McKendrick noted in yesterday's "Progress makes another SOA acquisition: Mindreef," Mindreef has a better home as a part of the broader solution that Progress (Actional) offers: "With IONA and Mindreef, Progress is clearly aiming to develop and offer an end-to-end suite of SOA products — from integration to management."

 

The open source market also commoditized some aspects of web services testing - as web services standards start to solidify, an open source tool like SOAPUI meets the needs of developers who don't mind coding some functional tests if they only concerned with testing WSDL/SOAP for compliance checks. This is also why we gave away a free web services only testing version of LISA for a year. And you know what we found? If a company is serious about SOA they will need to go deeper than web services.

 

Are times hard for iTKO with all this consolidation? Are you getting acquired?

• First of all, here at iTKO we are quite comfortable with our market leadership, awareness and growth. We are coming off a record quarter, record year-over-year growth, and we are reinvesting that in continued research and support, so LISA can be the most complete SOA testing, validation and virtualization framework on the market.
• Second, a BIG part of enabling quality and trust in SOA is in the ability to work with all the leading SOA platforms. Yes, we've seen a lot of consolidation lately, however our CUSTOMERS still have a heterogeneous mix of new and existing technologies to integrate and validate, and we are committed to helping them. So we will continue to partner with and drive quality and virtualization into all the leading SOA platform vendors - including TIBCO, SoftwareAG, SOA Software, SAP, IBM MQ, Oracle/BEA and more. Variety is a good thing for the agility and reuse we expected of SOA, but it presents a big risk. If we can help companies mitigate the risk of all that complexity at a lower cost, that is a good thing. 
• Third, we will support Progress customers - for instance we are still the only native Sonic ESB/integration testing solution out there, and we can interact with Actional SOA governance tools within the same framework. We can also Virtualize service environments for Progress customers, so they have a ready SOA test and dev environment without the constraints of access and dependency on a complex SOA environment - whether they use LISA to test, or try Mindreef tools. This coexistence is nothing new for us - many of our customers are also using HP/Mercury and Rational tools and processes and seek iTKO's help for SOA-specific challenges we address.

That's all for now - of course, we'll still keep up with Jeff Schneider's "SOA Consolidation" hit list to see if anything is happening we don't know about ;)

http://schneider.blogspot.com/2008/06/mindreef-acquired-by-progress-software.html

 

Web 2.0 versus SOA?

WeB 2.0 versus SOA? So I’m reading Blogs -- which is suspect to begin with because I’m sure there’s just a bunch of random content out there in the blog world right? And, I run across several Blogs on Web 2.0 versus SOA”.

Let me tell you friends -- if someone is trying to pit Web 2.0 versus SOA they either don’t understand Web 2.0, they don’t understand SOA or both. I thought Joe McKendrick did a good job of describing the irrelevance of this argument as far as CTOs are concerned in Another view: A CTO underwhelmed by SOA,.

It’s complementary to SOA, which is a way to establish the decomposition of business logic to establish service-based workflows--to break apart monolithic systems into services such that collaboration among services is more rapid and more agile.

So what you can accomplish with Web 2.0 is synergistic with what you can do with SOA. By the way, don’t misread this and therefore presume that SOA requires Web 2.0.(because that Blog, I am sure will be the next Blog I see if I go Googling a little bit more) and that’s not correct either.

You can build SOA with C code and Windows Client UI written in VB if you wish. The goal here is to try to establish a little more sanity in what these things actually are. Web 2.0 is a great way to put a thin client yet interactive user experience on the desktop. SOA is a great way to go about the process of decomposing systems into services and making business alignments through business process management.
- John Michelsen, founder and Chief Architect, iTKO LISA