The ITKO Blog: Service Virtualization and Application Lifecycle Optimization - CA Technologies

CloudLuminaries Video: Leveraging Cloud & Service Virtualization at DirecTV

Just saw a very good interview with DirecTV's CIO Mike Benson, talking about how his development and test strategy uses Cloud-based resources alongside ITKO's virtual service environments to accelerate time to market for more than 25 million customers.

 

Mike talks about how for faster development, it is important to have an environment that "feels like the real thing." That's exactly the kind of approach we would encourage. Setting up virtual environments can take minutes, versus hours or days compared to production-style test labs - and the results are far more predictable and stable.

We highly recommend visiting CA's Cloud and Innovation Luminaries sites for many more great customer stories like this one. Stop by our friends at http://www.CA.com/CloudLuminaries for more high-business value video.

 

Service Virtualization market covered in SearchSOA

Great far-reaching Service Virtualization market overview this week in TechTarget (SearchSOA) by George Lawton - "Service Virtualization arises to meet services testing obstacles"

Read here: http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/2240150279/Service-virtualization-arises-to-meet-services-testing-obstacles

Dubie on Service Assurance Daily: The Best Kept Technology Secret

We just saw an excellent new article posted by Denise Dubie on the popular blog Service Assurance Daily -- covering the advance of the market for Service Virtualization:

Letting You In On The Best Kept Technology Secret
Service virtualization isn’t new, but it’s getting renewed interest from some big vendors and for good reason.

Indeed we have seen SV go from the purview of just a couple very early adopters in 2007 to something that multiple major players are now serving in the market. Why is this change happening so fast right now?

Fundamentally we are all aware of the increase in complexity in our business applications, driven by the increasing expectations of customers. Forces that affect the largest enterprises are even harder to tackle. Million-hour integration projects for mergers, ever-expanding data needs, massive capacity and access constraints and limited budgets despite the need for more functionality.

We need to simulate and isolate ourselves from all of the above issues much earlier in development, if we expect our fragile software infrastructures to adapt with the needs of our enterprise. We aren't talking about simple problems, and the stakes are huge here.

Service Virtualization isn't going to be a secret for long with the advances we are seeing in this space. I recommend you join the conversation going on at www.ServiceVirtualization.com, where you will see multiple customers, service providers and vendors talking about this technology and new business practices that takes a page from other industries that are already familiar with the concept of robust simulation or virtualization for better product development.

Story: http://www.serviceassurancedaily.com/2012/05/letting-you-in-on-the-best-kept-technology-secret/

 

 

ServiceVirtualization.Com Webinar Preview with Gartner, CA (ITKO), Burt

Looking for non-vendor specific best practices advice and commentary from peer companies that have tried and learned how to succeed (or fail) at Service Virtualization? There's a community site coming up that will help professional of all companies share valuable lessons on how to best employ this transformational technology as an everyday practice to make application development better, faster and cheaper.

 

Hear John discuss why the new ServiceVirtualization.Com community is happening and join him at the upcoming webinar:

Webinar: Parallel Development with Service Virtualization
with Gartner, ITKO and HSBC content on http://www.servicevirtualization.com.

Global run times:

• May 16, 2012 | 1:00PM Central US - North America
• May 17, 2012 | 1:00PM AEST (GMT +10:00) Asia/Pacific
• May 17, 2012 | 10:00AM GMT Europe/UK

The first cool thing happening on this new site is an upcoming webinar featuring:

• Gartner research director Tom Murphy discussing the current state of Parallel Development given an increasing amount of complexity and change in today's apps that inhibits software teams best attempts at Agile.
• ITKO founder / CA distinguished engineer John Michelsen talking about the advance of Service Virtualization practices for faster time-to-market by replacing production-style software labs with virtual service environments
• Burt Klein, customer advocate for ServiceVirtualization.com and one of the first leaders of Service Virtualization practices as a former SVP of Performance and Resiliency at a top 5 global bank, discusses how his teams drastically shortened release cycles while improving performance by "shifting quality left" at integration testing - using service virtualization to remove as much as $60M or more of infrastructure cost.

We'll be on the community. So will our customers and partners. And so will other software companies. Why are we all there? Service Virtualization is not just software you buy, it is fundamentally something you do.

 

 

 

On CA Communities: Accept Imitations, Not Limitations

I recently caught up with the "Consumer-Driven IT" CA Communities team about contributing an introduction to the concept and practice of Service Virtualization (SV) for their blog. You can read the results here:

Consumer Driven IT: Accept Imitations, but Not Limitations

The message of SV resonates really well with today's most pressing Consumer-Driven IT challenges. Companies are being driven to release new applications to market faster than ever, through new channels that reach customers where they are: whether that means mobile devices, Cloud-based apps, within new social communities and trading networks.

But underneath all these new delivery methods, none of the existing infrastructure and complexity ever goes away -- in fact we have more change and chaos than ever, keeping track of partner applications as well as our critical mainframes and transaction services.

The only safe way to successfully reach market in such an environment is by using virtual environments throughout development and testing of each new piece of IT or software functionality. Using Service Virtualization, all the teams in these distributed environments get very stable labs that allow them to cover all needed customer scenarios, even if they are unavailable, unready, or undergoing change.

Hope you like the article and check out the many useful updates in CA Communities. Link: http://community.ca.com/blogs/perspectives/archive/2012/05/01/consumer-driven-it-accept-imitations-but-not-limitations.aspx

Be Childish about Service Virtualization

One of the secrets to success with Service Virtualization is being childish. Looking at the many geek toys we often find around active development shops, maybe we don't need to reinforce this point too much - other than asking you to look at SV from a kid's perspective in terms of your real, "Adult-Size" SDLC issues...

When it comes down to it, we could probably learn a couple more tips on virtual environments from little kids:

1. Intuition: Kids tend to have an an extrasensory capacity at times, as they don't have as many assumptions to draw upon... maybe if we used our intuition a little more we would not only trust the virtual environment, we would also gain a better sense for predicting errors much earlier in our own development processes.
   
   
2. Frankness: Kids haven't yet learned to candy-coat their opinions. "You smell bad. Why are you so bald?" This frankness is exactly what we need more of in development - rather than building based on an ideal world and happy-path verifications of functionality, let's use service virtualization to automate the capture of a much clearer reflection of the environments around our apps, warts and all.
   
   
3. Imagination: Kids have no trouble at all believing in, and playing in a virtual reality. You know the game where every couch and chair is a raft, and the rest of the floor is shark-infested water or lava? The real world has conditioned us grownups to distrust anything that isn't real -- but in the case of SV, we need to realize that the fake is BETTER than the real thing for most of the SDLC.

If kids can teach us adults some new tricks, it is that imagination and virtualization are kind of similar - they can enable us to "play anywhere" without requiring a huge amount of set building, money and prep time. If we want to make development fun again, having a virtual world to develop and test without constraints seems like an excellent place to start.

Australia vs. the World: Service Virtualization Critical in Good and Bad Economic Times

Why is Service Virtualization (SV) so huge down under in ANZ, as well as here in North America? I recently returned from another tour of Australia and was met by a writer for their IT Wire publication about the high level of adoption of LISA's Service Virtualization software by most of the leading financial and telco IT shops in the region:

IT Wire Article: ITKO LISA simplifies testing of composite systems through simulation

Australia is the alternate proof point for much of the rest of the world, demonstrating how Service Virtualization is mandatory in both good times and bad.

When times are GOOD, businesses demand faster time-to-market and more aggressive software delivery schedules to capitalize on ideal conditions. While the rest of the world was feeling an economic pinch in 2008, Australia had strong resources and a growing economy - therefore they needed unconstrained development, to seize on business opportunities in Asia and the rest of the world.

A small company gets better and bigger by being aggressive with its IT investments in good times. That's why you began to see virtually every bank in Australia as well as other IT-enabled companies radically accelerating their development shops by adopting virtual service environments and even private DevTest Clouds over the last 3 years.

But what about bad economic times? We are more familiar with that story for the last 3 years in North America and Europe. Overall budget slashes and IT cost-cutting measures are happening across the economy. Yet many companies still invested in Service Virtualization when times were bad. Why?

Increasing IT efficiency in bad times with SV allows companies to keep their existing employees making gains in productivity, simulate and adjust to the impact of meeting new regulations, reduce costly defects, retain customers, and operate their systems with less infrastructure and cost.

Companies don’t generally grow relative to each other in good times, they do in BAD times. You need to invest in operational efficiencies such as Service Virtualization not just in good times, but throughout hard times. The companies that can deliver on their promises while maintaining high quality will retain customers, and further, those that can innovate through hard times will gain customers and come out ahead when good times return.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LISA Customers at CA World'11 - An Excellent Hour of Real Stories and Results

Most of us ITKOers are just back from our very first CA World -- and it couldn't have been a more exciting time, as we see LISA solutions becoming a key part of of the CA family of solutions and optimizing the application lifecycle for a whole new set of customers. Thanks to everyone who visited our booth and attended our fun outdoor reception Monday night.

The pinnacle of the conference, for me at least, was the ITKO Customer Session on Tuesday, where some of our leading customers at HSBC, IBM Global Services, Sprint and SoCal Edison shared their real-world stories and results of implementing LISA to eliminate constraints from their application lifecycles.

Highlights included:

• An estimated 50% faster time to market for new product/functionality delivery across the board - meeting management's critical requirement for more agile innovation.
• As much as 94-99.6% faster system testing cycles. The customer said "I would have reported 100% improvement because of the level of automation, but nobody would have believed me!"
• For 2000+ development and test resources, increased the availability of environments to consistently identify defects 2 phases earlier (40-70% cycle time reduction), and realized ROI within 30 days.

One of the coolest things we've ever seen came up in the last spot - a fun internal education videos SCE's Hector Sotelo showed here during his talk - "I Need An Environment":

 

After the session there were some great questions for the group -- and, not unexpectedly, a healthy degree of skepticism from the audience that Service Virtualization and automation with LISA could yield huge results like saving $12M in infrastructure costs, 50% faster time to delivery and 99%+ faster regression and integration test cycles.

But this session was not ITKO telling the story - it was a real LISA customer panel that has been there, and done that -- and the consensus was that while the software does a lot - is is still people that must make the change. The challenges of realizing optimization in the software lifecycle aren't technical in most cases. The panel explained how they got the buy-in and adoption of not just one development or test team, but IT ops, management, and the line of business that depends on software for its offerings.  Anyway, this was a very compelling session to hear, so expect some more observations about it and plans for more customer sessions in the future. We'll let you know when more videos and material from CA World 2011 become available.

 

 

CA World Vision Award Winner – 5 Questions with First Data’s Laura Miller

Here at the CA World 2011 conference, the Agility Made Possible Customer awards were just announced, and First Data Corporation won the Vision Award for excellence in Service Assurance practices for their groundbreaking use of CA LISA to eliminate constraints and establish a Performance Testing Center of Excellence.

Read the press release here: “CA Technologies 2011 Agility Made Possible Awards Honors Customers’ Successes in IT Management and Security”

We have seen this company really take to heart the practice of delivering product to market faster using Service Virtualization to eliminate access constraints and setup time.

I recently had a chance to have 5 questions with Laura Miller, VP of Global Product Development at First Data, about her company’s journey using LISA to optimize performance and deliver product faster.

What is the project that brought on your team’s use of LISA?

We needed to performance test and rearchitect two of our front end financial institution products that both business and end clients will use in their own sites and call centers. It was critical that we have real-time levels of performance, or sub-second response times built in from the ground up. Our consulting partners helped us design a solution, and they recommended leveraging LISA to achieve the testing we needed.

Much of this Vision award is about finding new ways to overcome traditional constraints on software development. How has your group done this?

I like the fact that LISA really takes away traditional constraints. In the old days we would have had to build out the entire infrastructure, even if it was a smaller version of it. Or we would have had to write our own stubs. With LISA we were able to virtualize the mainframes and it took no time at all – it only took us two weeks to get a good representation running.

Also we wanted 24/7 testing, and we often have teams offshore testing at any time of day. With LISA I didn’t have any back-end constraint to moving forward. Not only were we able to get it set up quickly, but we were able to finish testing quickly, and therefore get our product out the door faster.

How important is time to market in your industry and what can IT do to accelerate it?

I don’t think there’s a market today where speed-to-market isn’t important. Look at Apple, FedEx and what they do. Obviously it is critical. For us it is all about the ability to deliver faster, and with higher quality, while reducing our setup time and not having to build new architecture. The setup and configuration of time of LISA also went very quickly as we got skilled people on the job.

The one thing we all know is that testing always gets short-changed. Timelines always get reduced, and that’s not changing. Being able to test 24/7, and not have downtime, really allowed us to push our application and know it would perform.

Behind any successful implementation or modernization there are usually multiple teams that need to get involved – has collaboration improved?

In our organization, collaboration was key on this. Before this initiative, we didn’t have a dedicated performance team in our Testing Center of Excellence, so we had to collaborate and bring in stakeholders from capacity planning, development, infrastructure teams, as well as functional testing and other groups. It was the first time we really brought all these groups together.

Our systems have grown internally and incrementally, over time. It used to not be as critical to worry about this because most apps were mainframe-based. Now these systems have become a dependency for us and even the business side is looking to us to confirm that we meet our client requirements.

What has it been like working with ITKO, now a CA Technologies company?

We’re very excited as a team to win the CA World Vision award this year. We were already CA customers and we have almost every tool they make, including APM, Clarity, and many other solutions. We are working on the next projects of performance testing and automation. 

I have always been pleased with ITKO and what they do with innovation, collaboration with clients and their drive to constantly make LISA a product that makes our lives better. A month ago I met with ITKO leadership and some other customers, and they wanted to hear our input on where they should invest more development time and what they could do better. That’s a very unique culture for a software company. We expect that level of passion and commitment to improve the product from the people who made LISA.

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.

A High-Velocity Customer Event Retrospective

This last weekend we had an excellent time hosting some select customers for the Bank of America 500 race in Charlotte, NC. We got an up-close perspective of the race, with access to some really cool behind the scenes areas inside and outside the track, meeting some of the top drivers and seeing how their crews are tuning and optimizing the cars for performance. Here's a quick video from the event:

 

But this was not an all-play weekend, we also dedicated some time to discussing how to optimize application lifecycles for better performance and higher-speed delivery with these key customers.  We outlined some areas of the company and product in order to find the best use of our resources to help our customers finish first.

Three trends that really seemed to emerge:

• Companies are thinking about Cloud more than ever, but they are starting with Private Clouds for development and testing purposes and are mostly moving non-business related applications to public clouds.
• Customers are shifting quality left by reorganizing labor pools to become more efficient.  Most of the customers represented are bringing more technical and engineering resources into managing their quality as the lines between application development and quality continue to blur.
• Test Data Management continues to haunt all of the customers represented.  As applications break apart and are released and maintained with separate lifecycles, the variables in the data scenarios explode. Methods for capturing and virtualizing "just the data you need" became an interesting point of discussion.

Great commentary at the event regarding practices and procedures - here's some of the best quotes:

• A banking customer said: "I’ll take integrated solutions over best of breed every time."
• Another banking customer stated: “There are so many data scenarios associated with credit cards that you can’t count them.”
• One customer stated regarding reorganizations:  “My group has been in 6 different reporting structures in 5 years, and we still continue to perform the same single function.”

All this means that there is more pressure than ever on these teams to deliver more functionality, faster, against an ever-increasing level of complexity. Among many of the customers of LISA there is also a lot of synergy with what CA is doing within their infrastructure and applications side of the house - so ITKO becoming a CA company has been met with a lot of enthusiasm.

A fun aside, ITKO also now the unofficial sponsor of "Couchman" (Approximately 00:29 in the video) if you are ever looking to relax in style at one of these events! For some more commentary on the event, our own marketer arranging the ground @scottkingtx posted some feedback on his own blog. Great event!

Ready to Fly at TIBCO TUCON 2011 - Session

We're in the midst of preparing for TIBCO's big annual event, TUCON 2011 - September 27-29 - this year it's in Las Vegas at the Aria Hotel. It's been 3 years since our last appearance at one of these shows.

Our co-founder & Chief Technologist Ruston Vickers will be presenting Wednesday, Sept. 28th at 3:40PM as part of the show's Cloud Track: "ITKO: Make TIBCO Application Development Lifeycles Fly." [See the Cloud Track of sessions here.]

Ruston's session will cover 6 different customer examples - from an investment bank that avoided dangerous software problems by "shifting quality left" and continuously validating their TIBCO RV ESB systems and messaging, to a Telco that is developing and testing complex apps in Cloud environments at a huge cost savings and scalability advantage.

As you might have noticed, ITKO is now a CA Technologies company, and our theme for this show is "Where Agility Takes Flight." Fundamentally, our LISA products help TIBCO customers deliver critical IT functionality to market faster, cheaper, and with better quality.

You won't be able to miss our booth -- so if you hover around there, ask us how the union of LISA and CA product suites will help your TIBCO integration and Cloud projects get off the ground faster, and improve coverage across the lifecycle of applications, beyond LISA's innovative development, test, Service Virtualization and DevTest Cloud environments that TIBCO and its customers are already familiar with.

We're looking forward to this show. TUCON puts the customers first, and provides great insight into the latest practices happening in integration environments and partners swirling around this company. You can register for the event here: http://tucon.tibco.com/ and tell 'em we sent you!

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.

 

 

ITKO - Evolution of a Brand

Here's a marketing-related blog instead of our usual IT best practices and business updates, so if that's not interesting to you, come back soon. You may have noticed an updated look for ITKO including a new website and logo over the last month or so, with visual changes prior to and after the news about CA acquiring ITKO.

As we continue to grow, so does our brand awareness. Most people look for ITKO because they've been referred to us by name. So while we still advertise, about 56% of people visiting our site either enter our full URL or search for ITKO and LISA by name.

Therefore, we embarked on a logo redesign working alongside our design firm this year. How did we get here from the "iTKO" you might have known in the old days?

• The new logo is a departure from the previous ITKO and LISA combined logo.  This is to clearly represent the company name as ITKO (pronounced "eye tee kay oh") from the product, still known as LISA.
• The ITKO logo and usage in text is now all caps -- very bold and clearly recognizable in small digital advertising and product formats as well as having larger, more readable size for both apparel and large signage uses in tradeshows etc.
• LISA, as a separate solution offered by ITKO, will retain a lighter, open box format and keep the "flower" part of the old logo as its product icon in headers, installers, etc. for the software product.

We are also showing a new tagline "Virtualize Everything" as part of this rebranding to help further differentiate our company and our approach around how we help customers simulate their IT environments and eliminate constraints, in large part through virtualization of inaccessible or incomplete services so teams can move forward. To do the job right we recommend you "virtualize everything." The tagline may change from time to time depending on what we are featuring.

The new site has a "big company" feel which becomes more and more important as we continue to grow rapidly and do business with some of the worlds largest organizations. We will continue to enhance our use of video throughout the site. Take a look at the new intro by John on the front page to see an example of high quality video produced entirely in house.  Check out the new look at http://www.ITKO.com and let us know what you think!

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.

Webinar w/ Infosys 6/15: Solving the Hardest DevTest Challenges with Service Virtualization

We're looking forward to our third major webinar with Infosys, in which we wrap up our joint series of events on accelerating testing and collaboration for now -- with one covering the best practices of Service Virtualization.

Many of the world's leading companies trust their delivery and testing business to Infosys, and therefore they are particularly qualified to know about how to achieve higher levels of efficiency across large, geographically distributed services teams, through eliminating constraints and isolating the right conditions for validating that functionality gets delivered as expected.

Webinar with Infosys and ITKO June 15^th, 1:00PM CDT:
"Solving the Toughest Development and Testing Problems with Service Virtualization"

Join Infosys' Aparna Sharma and iTKO's John Michelsen for this Service Virtualization best practices and technology review webinar. This session for ITKO and Infosys customers and subscribers, will cover:

• How to break down silos that exist in complex business processes to enable end to end business process testing
• Parallel development and testing strategies
• How to provide software dev & test teams with a more production-like environment with Service Virtualization, and
• Performance and Regression Testing against Virtual Labs

Hope you can join us for this compelling online event - it's your best chance to hear from two thought leaders in software delivery. Bring your questions!

Has BPM Evolved? Preview of ITKO at Software AG's ProcessWorld Berlin

We'll be heading to Berlin next week to attend Software AG's ProcessWorld 2011 - Europe, and with their recent acquisition of IDS Scheer, this partner is really bringing BPM to the forefront by combining a strong combined product and services offering.

Lately most of our discussions have covered the development, integration and testing infrastructure needed to build software. But we are also being asked, especially by our EMEA customers, has the advance of Service Virtualization and elastic Cloud devtest infrastructure also advanced their ability to successfully execute on a BPM strategy? We think so.

Invoke and Verify is alive and well - and accelerating the delivery of proven BPM processes. This is largely because we are now able to "bridge the gaps" of waiting for human and machine responses, and decrease our dependence on manual verification of results.

Using Service Virtualization, a BPM team can set up automatic, continuous validation processes, with Virtual Services providing the underlying models of dependent mainframes, test data, transaction processes, and user response scenarios needed to ensure process integrity. Non-technical business experts should not only design processes, they should be empowered to self-verify them as well, and that's what LISA's Pathfinder capabilities are all about - one-click reporting and tracing of issue through the infrastructure, so your process guys can get all the details to developers for much higher acceptance and resolution rates.

In light of the need for continuous BPM validation - at ProcessWorld, ITKO's LISA Product Manager Chris Kraus will be presenting a session Wednesday, June 1st - 2:15PM titled:

"Continuous Development, Integration & Test with Virtual Service Environments"

What youll learn: As today’s enterprise applications include more composite elements such as SOA, BPM and Cloud-based services, IT teams struggle to deliver needed software functionality against rapidly increasing complexity and change.  The new technology of Service Virtualization, which captures and simulates the behavior, data and performance characteristics of unavailable or incomplete systems for unconstrained use in development and testing lifecycles, relieves these issues when applied with the right methodology.

Four key capabilities your organization should look for in a Service Virtualization approach can enable extended software dev & test teams to get high quality Software AG-powered applications to market faster, with dramatically lower cost and risk. This session will cover:

• How to provide software dev & test teams with a more Live-like environment  
• Parallel development and testing strategies
• Virtualizing Test Data for out-of-scope systems
• Performance Testing against Virtual Labs

Customer examples of faster software delivery with lower cost and risk will be presented from three leading Software AG-based IT shops in Financial Services, Telecommunications and Retail industries. Come see iTKO in Booth #1 - we're a proud Platinum sponsor of this critical BPM, SOA and integration summit.

 

 

A few more highlights from Impact (vid)

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

 

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

 

Just Landed from #IBMImpact 2011 - Agility is Smart Business

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant

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

iTKO 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.

 

Cool Field Story 3: Self-Service Virtualization

Here's another great story Ken and I gathered after a recent successful deployment. Technology is always rushing forward with more customizable development and test lab solutions for every enterprise.  Even at iTKO we continue to extend leading-edge product functionality for all the unique scenarios that customers bring forward.

Much of the time this type of customization is focused on making automated testing or performance testing more efficient.  But in reality, there are still tens of thousands of manual testers out there, and save for some slight process improvement, they have been largely ignored over the years when it comes to automating their complete environment.

An iTKO telco customer recently showed some examples of how they enabled their manual testers to be much more efficient through the use of Service Virtualization.  After sending transactions through their Front-End CRM UI, they log into their Back-End UI which shows them the detail of the Virtual Services captured behind their System Under Test.  This Back-End UI is something they developed on top of LISA Virtualize, and it exposes the current data inside LISA, such as the status of various Customer Orders, previously executed transactions, etc.

That’s mildly interesting, so testers can at least see if the transactions are properly reaching the Back-End.  However, what’s really clever is that they let the manual testers go in and modify the Back-End Virtual Service directly.  Testers can automatically skip a number of steps to put an order into the completion phase (which would typically take a very long time to enter in the Front-End UI), or they can setup negative scenarios such as an invalid order, error condition, etc.

This lets users decide in real-time exactly how they want the system to behave.  They are able to test a larger number of scenarios simply by being able to create conditions that the test lab normally does not allow.  And manual testers are empowered to setup their own scenarios without involving the DBAs and higher-level Test Data Management architects.  So by being able to quickly “prepare” the virtual environment for a specific test, they do not have to spend so much time setting and resetting test data.

Fortunately for them this has come with a number of positive results as well:

• Functional coverage after the first project stands at 80%, and they plan to reach 90% by the next release.
• Testers are 40-50% more efficient without needing access to specific test data, or getting a DBA to setup a specific scenario
• Testing across the board has started earlier in the software lifecycle, and they are finding defects much earlier in the SDLC
• Oh, and on top of all that they’re already saving over $200K annually, simply by not sending transactions to validate their system against the third-party vendor's test lab system (which was seldom working reliably and had unstable data anyway).

We hope you find these real-world stories useful in thinking about how to improve your own dev and test processes. Let us know what you think, and if there are any software challenges you would like us to cover in future articles!

John - Talking Cloud Development & Test on TMCnet

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

Enjoy:

 

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

 

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.

Case Study - Test, Integrate and Virtualize Environments at Oracle

When the world's largest enterprise software company makes a commitment to "shift quality left" - and make consistent improvements in time-to-market, labor and infrastructure costs, and delivered quality across product lines, that equates to a case study worth reading.

• Read the iTKO LISA Case Study: Oracle Testing & Validation here.

This year we've been working with Oracle to automate and remove constraints from aspects of their own software lifecycle, and I recently had a chance to interview two of the leads on our projects there.

First, Oracle AIA (Application Integration Architecture) group's Nand Shivkumar described how they were able to Virtualize the company's integration labs, and offer their business-specific process integrations as Virtual Services for other performance and test teams to use for their own parallel development without delays or conflicts over access.

We also talked with the Oracle Fusion ADF (Application Development Framework) quality lead Amitabh Nandan about how they are conducting complex testing, then automating those as test suites that validate their advanced Web 2.0 style interfaces and frameworks for building customer apps.

For a software company that has grown with extensive product development as well as through strategic acquisition of leading product suites, the ability to rapidly integrate and deploy apps depends on having ready lab environments, as well as highly automated testing that can peel the layers of their architecture from the rich UI to the middle tier. Hope you enjoy the story and your feedback is appreciated.

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.

News Today: LISA Across the Software Lifecycle at Australia and New Zealand Bank

Today's press release represents a very significant customer announcement in a very important geography for iTKO. Several leading institutions in Australia & New Zealand are selecting LISA for virtualisation (proper English spelling, of course) of their software development and testing environments, as well as end-to-end testing and validation activities.

We are particularly excited to announce this new deployment at ANZ Bank via today's press release:

iTKO LISA Software deployed in Asia Pacific
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group selects iTKO’s LISA Testing, Validation and Virtualisation Solutions

Here's an excerpt from the release: “After an evaluation process that considered our existing technologies and future IT objectives, we ultimately decided that iTKO’s complete LISA Suite would reduce risk, cycle times and costs across our development and testing cycles,” said ANZ Head of Testing, Environments & Change CoE, Technology Global Solution Delivery, Marcello Martino. “We believe that LISA will allow us to automate more activities, improve our use of existing infrastructure, enhance collaboration, and help us to better meet our customer needs.”

This bank is representative of modernization going on in technology groups in the entire APAC region. ANZ is making huge leaps in modernizing their SDLC lab environments, and collaborating with delivery partners, through virtual services, validation and governance technologies. We think this is only the start of advances we'll see coming from down under as adoption of Cloud-based dev & test practices accelerates.

Related coverage on this news:

• Computerworld.au: ANZ picks up in-house testing platform
• ITWire: Westpac and ANZ float cloud testing
• Global Services: ANZ Picks Up In-house testing platform
• Finextra: ANZ and Westpac tap the cloud for testing
• MIS Asia (Ovum perspective): Calling retail banks: boarding on your flight to the cloud has now commenced

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.

SearchSOA Editor's Notebook: DevTest Clouds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

News Today: Enabling the Defense Community in the Cloud with LISA Virtual Dev & Testing

Today iTKO issues a press release about our support for Forge.Mil, a collaborative software environment for the U.S. Department of Defense. As many of you know we have been following the dedicated work of DISA (DoD’s IT arm), and LISA-enabling their leading partners (such as Harris, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, and many others) over the last 5 years, as a part of certifying and test services that are contributing to deliver functionality to the warfighter.

Here's the official press release out today:

Optimized Software Virtualization, Test and Validation in the Cloud for U.S. Department of Defense

DISA's Forge.Mil Initiative to Offer Shared TestForge Services in the Cloud, Enabling Faster Delivery of Capabilities to the Warfighter Through Software Release Efficiencies

Most discussion of Cloud to date is focused on either the infrastructure itself (the actual servers and running VMs, or IaaS - Infrastructure as as Service), or the applications themselves that are hosted on Cloud (for instance a SaaS-based offering). But how do we successfully deliver today's complex applications, when all the dependencies and constraints of unavailable systems drag teams down? Nowhere would this challenge be more evident than in Defense, where the work of many distributed teams must go on, while at the same time critical live systems must be secured against the volatility of testing and development.

Forge.Mil contains a Cloud-based community called TestForge - with a built-in Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Virtual Service Environments, so all development and test contributors can have 24/7 availability without impacting live systems, and create new levels of efficiency. The Forge.Mil initiative (which includes TestForge, SourceForge as well as providing a cloud platform for other aspects of software lifecycle management) proves that in many aspects of IT governance and innovation, federal agencies continue to lead the way over the private sector. Optimizing software in this sense can not only save time and money, but lives in the field. Thanks to everyone who has helped drive this vision.

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Employing Virtual Environments for Manual Testers: It Still Doesn't Suck

Here's a brand new article in Virtualization Journal: Employing Virtual Environments for Manual Testers from one of our expert architects, Andy Nguyen.

Here at iTKO, we evangelize virtualizing and automating the entire software development lifecycle. While manual testing is a topic we don't cover as often - Virtualization of Manual Testing labs is a really cool thing that can add a lot of value in any large IT organization. For every development and test automation expert in an enterprise, there can be a whole team of on-site, partner, outsourced and seasonal testers sitting idle - waiting for access to a valid, configured test environment to run their scenarios against.

This article contained a cartoon - you might remember our distant history when we advertised the claim that "Your Testing Sucks" - and nobody ever disagreed with us. So here's the comic by Sal Monella:

Service Virtualization is the best way to solve the above constraint for Larry Lamprey, not buying more hardware or conducting laborious, expensive custom setups of a multi-tier environment behind the UI for testers.

Manual testing is never going to disappear, as someone will always be expected to test application UIs for user experience, etc. However, to eliminate downtime from testing, and conflicts over limited available test environments, ALL testers can use a Virtual Service Environment (VSE) to stay productive. Virtualization of those setups and data scenarios also delivers a huge productivity boost.

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.

News Today: iTKO's LISA is Ready for Rational

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

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

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

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

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

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

iTKO Webinar Dec. 15th with TCS: Modernizing Application Quality

Here's a little reminder to stop by and register for next week's webinar with iTKO and TCS, titled "Leveraging Modern Software Quality to Prevent Cost and Schedule Overruns" - running December 15, 2009 at 1:00PM EST. This session will feature Siva Ganesan, the Global head of Assurance Services of TCS, and iTKO founder/Chief Geek John Michelsen.

A sneak peek into this production: a lot of new thinking appears in the content. TCS has one of the most mature software testing practices around, but this webinar focuses firmly on the future. Automation techniques, virtualization of constraints and a rapid, iterative approach are needed to tackle the kinds of advanced, distributed, heterogeneous architectures we need to test.

Sign up for the webinar here: http://www.itko.com/resources/webinar_tcs_dec2009.jsp. If you miss the time, we'll send you an archive link later.

The Future of Cloud is the Past of SOA: DBTA article

I realize I might take some heat from a few Cloud pundits for comparing admittedly disparate items in this new article in Database Trends & Analysis: "The Future of Cloud Computing is the Recent Past of SOA for the Software Lifecycle".

As the hype around SOA faded into the overall idea of enterprise architecture, and Virtualization became a standard procedure for saving costs, Cloud Computing became the Next Big Thing for IT. (Somewhere, a self-described Cloud Expert is groaning while reading this sentence and getting ready to blast it on Twitter...)

The ability to provision a complete solution, and scale it on a pay-as-you-need basis on Cloud-based systems is very appealing. However, Cloud Computing faces an often unfounded lack of Trust - one that has nothing to do with the viability of well-designed and managed software, whether or not it resides within a company's datacenter.

So now, let's compare it to the recent past of SOA, which is well beyond it's "Wild West" days of a bunch of loosely assembled services that weren't appropriately governed or tested. Even 2 or 3 years ago, we found people asking very similar questions about trusting SOA. Now? It's quietly become a common strategy for integration in the enterprise.

I'm just saying, there will be a day, not so far in the future, when IT collectively wakes up, rubs its eyes and realizes almost everything has become some sort of Cloud Computing, some combination of Public and Private clouds. The concerns we hear today about trusting the Cloud will again fade into trusting applications in general: Are they well-designed and implemented with appropriate security?

And we can move on to worry about the Next Big Thing.

The News - Working with Harris on Complex Validation Problems

Today iTKO made an announcement about our strategic partnership with Harris Corporation, a Fortune 200 systems integrator we have been working with on several significant projects in the US Department of Defense and other federal agencies. Read the press release here.

What is significant about this?  Many organizations (commercial and government) are realizing that while developers can build and integrate software faster than ever, their testing efforts have proven inadequate at keeping up. These agencies need proactive, automated, and continuous validation to ensure trust and reliability in federated, mission-critical systems that are subject to constant change.

iTKO and Harris are responding to this challenge with a validation and virtualization solution that will appeal to organizations that trust and rely on these systems. Examples include federal emergency management centers, military command and control systems, financial institution trading systems, utility energy management grids, airline traffic control networks, and many others.

While we have been cooperating with leading government contractors like Harris for 4 years on integration projects like these (see this iTKO paper on Federated governance we first wrote 3 years ago...) we have seen a major shift occurring in the way Federal agencies specify and manage their complex applications. They are moving to a shared services / shared components model, where different functional units (or, services) are consumed and managed by different teams, with a central point of certification and testing for these services.

A federated, shared governance model means there is just enough governance enforced at a central level, and authority for managing and using the application components is doled out to the constituents. We compare it to a Federal government vs. state's rights, vs. city council authority model. The federal government might specify a budget for a highway, but it doesn't dictate where parking is located in the city.

This federated model works very well for defense agencies and the many firms that support them, as they are all working toward a common goal - delivering functionality to the warfighter with maximum efficiency. As we have frequently mentioned in this blog, businesses would do well to take cues from how government scales their systems and cooperates to meet goals - they were leaders in SOA and will likely continue to lead the way in many aspects of modern application governance.