The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ITKO retrospective with John & Shridhar in D Magazine

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

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

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

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

Mock & Roll will Never Die

If you already have built a "mock system" in order to advance development, why would you need something better? I recently had a good conversation with our East architecture lead Ken Ahrens (see more of his work here) after a great CA World event for ITKO was winding down in Las Vegas. We had a lot of questions in our sessions about the development shop that has already "rolled their own" system of stubs and mocks - and what that meant for Service Virtualization practices.

When a company says they already have a mock system, we normally view that as a very positive sign - and tell them as much.  Often we have to convince customers that incomplete and unavailable systems are development problems that need to be solved, before we can even talk about the idea of Service Virtualization capabilities. Whereas the customer with a mock system already understands this is a real problem that needs to be solved.

I usually comment at this point about how we’ve replaced several mock systems at other customers (banks, utilities, telcos, etc...) with LISA's service virtualization. SV really is the productization of the stub and mock space, with enough sophistication to support more complex logic and performance scenarios. Similar to how you wouldn’t write your own database nowadays, it doesn’t make sense to build your own mock system when there is an industry standard solution for this available.

Some questions that usually come up:

• Does your mock system meet 100% of your needs and is it used on every single project?
• How expensive is the mock system to build and maintain?
• How fast do you need new mock services built, and are they ready on time?

If a development shop is mocking a single binary transaction -- that is a simple enough problem to solve with a bit of code. But as soon as multiple systems talk to each other, and multiple business scenarios need to be validated - the manual stub approach quickly starts to trip over its own weight, and the process of mocking and massaging test data and environments can drastically slow down delivery.

On one recent visit to an East coast utility, the customer team decided that LISA began to win (from a cost perspective) after only 10 rather finite services were mocked.  One of our favorite banks established a "center of excellence" for enabling teams with Service Virtualization instead of stubs, and measured a full return in about 6 months - then did something even more interesting by rapidly fixing issues found in production by virtualizing production behavior into the dev environment.  A successful customer like this doesn't just buy software, they take the adoption of the practice seriously - and it's usually the guys who have experienced the pain of rolling their own mocks that see the potential benefits the fastest.

In short – if you already do mock services we think it’s a good thing, so tell us about your story!

 

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 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.

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.

 

 

Helping a Telco Run Faster with Service Virtualization

Just got a really great note from one of our lead consultants in the field at a top US Telco provider. One of their major business groups that handles premium mobile content such as  search, games and entertainment, needed to go live with a new customer-facing system.

The highlights? Deployment had zero defects at launch and resulted in more than $3 million in software cost savings for 2011, while saving 4-5 weeks of expected cycle time.

The company had a driving reason to virtualize services, as they had a multi-million dollar upgrade planned for their delivery platform, and with it, a wash of additional licensing and maintenance expenditures.  Many of these costs would be "non value add" services and labor - duplicate licenses, time spent replicating over application servers and customer databases, all to provide an environment for them to use in pre-production to develop and test each new app against.

To top it off, the timeframe was extremely limited - the need for the above implementation was identified in March and the system was due in June this year! The app dev team chose to head off this requirement by implementing Service Virtualization models using LISA. If they failed, they would have been up the proverbial creek without an environment.

Fortunately, they were able to install and implement all of the needed virtual services and launch the new environment in less than 4 months - quite a difference from a process they had never before completed in less than a year. Then, the presence of completed, 24/7 available virtual labs allowed the development team to "shift quality left" and start collaborating immediately and shave 4-5 weeks off their expected customer services release timeline.

Anyway, we love hearing about teams that put Service Virtualization on the line to realize efficiencies and improved quality like this. Kudos!

New Paper: What Should a Service Virtualization Solution Do?

More than four years ago, we released the first version of LISA's Service Virtualization capabilities because we saw a fundamental roadblock occurring at almost every one of our enterprise customers. Sure, they were more efficiently automating functional, regression and performance testing with LISA, but inevitably, teams would complain that they still weren't becoming as "Agile" as they hoped. They were losing productivity due to constraints brought on by other parties they were connected to: partners and other dev teams that either didn't complete their delivery yet, or limited access to their systems.

This is why I'm excited to introduce this new paper I wrote for our 4-part joint IT Thought Leaders Whitepaper Series with our partners at Infosys:

Key Capabilities of a Service Virtualization Solution (Download PDF)
Eliminating Software Development and Testing Constraints by Virtualizing Away Dependencies in the Environment

We have to face the fact that no development team can build and test software in isolation anymore, using repurposed client-server tools. Software lifecycles are becoming increasingly composite and service-based, while an increasing number of smaller, agile teams created interdependencies that must be addressed with a new kind of virtualization - something we called Service Virtualization: the simulation of constrained or unavailable systems for continuous availability throughout the software development and testing lifecycle.

Service Virtualization is now maturing into a widely adopted technology, with many technology vendors embedded, and a market to support it. There are key capabilities any advanced enterprise dev and test team will need to have in a "live-like" virtual service environment that is as close to the real thing as it needs to be, without the constraints of excess coding, maintenance and reliance on big-iron systems to deliver new competitive functionality.

This paper is a good read if you are wondering where Service Virtualization technology has advanced over the last few years. It's not just about replacing the "stubs and mocks" developers used to hand-code with more pat request/responses. Today's apps have become far too interdependent, and fast-changing for that to be sufficient. Testers and developers must be able to recreate complex, composite workflows in an environment that looks and acts just like the real thing.

A smart counterpart at Infosys, Vijay Sairam Pratap, just commented on the story with a very compelling, clear anecdote about the level of realism needed from Service Virtualization to enable robust service assurance in his latest blog from an HP conference. We'll talk about that example, and a couple other newer real-world stories in our next post.

Link to Service Virtualization Capabilities whitepaper download page: http://www.itko.com/resources/service_virtualization_solution.jsp

 

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.

Whiteboard: What is LISA?

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming... We recently improved our video production abilities by leaps and bounds, so here's the latest high-tech whiteboard from ITKO's Founder & "Chief Geek" John Michelsen. Enjoy!

 

How does ITKO's LISA Solution enable Service Virtualization, Continuous Validation, Automation and Defect Collaboration to move development and testing life cycles forward faster with less risk and cost? It shouldn't take long to understand the basic concepts from scratch with this new video. Look for more educational resources here soon.

LISA Overview Video - Agile Composite App Dev in 6 Minutes

We just posted a long-form version of our very popular home page overview demo: "LISA: The Agile Composite Application Development Platform" that plays continuously and gives you a rundown of all 4 critical challenges and solutions relating to delivering software faster, with less cost and risk. Take 6 minutes and watch it here:

 

We also have an interactive version of the LISA overview demo that anyone can play here at http://itko.com/demo.

Moving Gracefully to the Cloud (Revisited - 1 Year Later)

Has Cloud development changed over the last year? It's about a year since we talked about "Moving Gracefully to the Cloud" here and put out our first papers on this topic, and a lot has transpired since then.

Companies embarked on multi-million dollar Cloud application projects, and encountered many of the roadblocks we discussed -- especially those "wires hanging out" of the cloud of unavailable or out of scope systems that are harder to provision or access during development.

But we've also managed to debunk a lot of the naysayers repeating the hackneyed complaints of "Cloud's not secure" or "Cloud doesn't scale" as we simply haven't found this to be true. The success of moving applications, and application development practices, to Cloud depends on People, Process, Technology - in that order, same as it ever was.

So here's John's Cloud "Chalk Talk" video, redux 1.23 years later:

 

We've seen several successful Cloud initiatives over the last year here, when companies adopt a comprehensive approach - sound architecture, considerations for performance and scalability, and most importantly continuous performance testing and validation to ensure that business outcomes are realized by the applications under development, every step of the way.

One leading insurer says they have already replaced more than 5000 development and test servers in their environment the first year by using Cloud-based labs with virtual services alongside virtual hardware. An Australian bank nearing the end of the DevTest Cloud's first year there is now predicting a 40% increase in efficiency across its entire application delivery team. All that represents a lot more functionality delivered successfully to market with the Cloud as an enabler. We'll continue to check in on these DevTest Cloud initiatives over the coming years here at the iTKO LISA Soapbox.

 

 

Video: Measuring Success in Customer Dev & Test Labs

Here's a new video commercial you'll see running in some of our upcoming channels about customer value. Obviously, there are a huge array of "test productivity" metrics like cost per test, cycle time per regression or peformance test suite that we continue to measure. However, with new capabilities of LISA like Service Virtualization, DCM and Pathfinder that have no direct equivalents out there in the market, proving customer value becomes paramount.

 

At iTKO we have a Business Value Assessment methodology to revisit customers at different points after adoption, and measure value delivered to date.

A big part of companies realizing value actually has little to do with our product, and everything to do with how aggressive the company is about scaling their efforts and defining a strategy to achieve the full potential value. This is why we have built out a very strong strategic Services arm and partner ecosystem - as the technology won't matter if the people involved don't adopt it with the appropriate methodology and commitment.

Often successully accelerating timelines or decreasing costs takes a change in mindset. For instance, if the company's IT leadership only thinks about Agile as something developers do while coding, and Testing as a point-in-time activity after deployment, they will have difficulties. The entire software lifecycle needs to be Agile -- and Testing isn't just for UAT, it's part of development, performance tuning, integration, every phase of that lifecycle. Sticking to the definitions of the past can be costly.

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.

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.

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.

Cool Field Story 2: From Production Issue to Resolution Virtually Overnight

Here's another great story from the field from iTKO lead solution strategist Ken Ahrens. (You may remember the paper he wrote with me on "Virtualizing Over-Utilized Systems" a few months ago).

When all else (literally) fails... try simulating from Production

One of our banking customers recently told us a success story about how they used Virtualize to solve an issue related to a production outage.  We were pretty surprised because LISA is primarily used for dev and test in the SDLC, and not typically in Operations and Production.  But they said for certain that their production defect was solved because they were able to use Virtualize to recreate the problem scenario.

However, Virtual Services was not their first approach.  When the Operations people identified that customers were experiencing a performance-related issue, they immediately contacted the Production Support team.  After collecting information about the issue they triaged to find that customer problems were due to a performance related issue happening in the middleware. 

Next, they immediately tried to recreate the problem by generating load in their test lab, but they found that they could not reproduce it there.  The test lab's version of the mainframe could not support the transaction load, so the back-end capacity was never high enough to recreate the problem in the middleware.  At this point, several developers and testers had spent more than a week trying to reproduce the issue, and they still didn’t know exactly what was causing the problem.

They reached out to the bank's performance team (who are avid LISA virtualization experts) to ask for assistance in running the stress tests.  The load team mentioned that for very high volume load tests, they used Virtual Services to simulate the back-ends, which had significantly higher capacity than the legacy mainframe system in the lab.  That way, there was no bottleneck behind the middleware under test.

The only problem was that the data was already set up in the live systems, and the Virtual Services used different data.  Typically this is the kind of problem that can take days to fix with DBAs manually copying records from one system to another and using conventional TDM (test data management) methods to ready all of the data for a test.  Indeed in this case, this effort had already taken place once. So instead of copying all that data to a new system, one of the Performance team engineers looked at their sample responses from Production and used LISA to automatically generate a thousand responses in a handful of Virtual Services in a couple of hours.

Immediately, they were able to generate the proper load on the middleware system, using the Virtual Service backend to eliminate the bottleneck.  They found they were quickly able to recreate the problem and identify the proper fix.  The typical resolution for this type of problem went from being measured in weeks to simply days (over a weekend, actually) through the use of Virtual Services.

The moral? When all else (literally) fails, support problem isolation and resolution with Virtual Services instead of trying to replicate what you don't need. It's predictable, scalable -- and just works!

 

 

Cool Story from the Field: Virtual Training Environments - Nothing to do with Dev & Test

I was recently talking to a banking customer who started using Service Virtualization to do something that is more than a novel use: setting up Training environments for thousands of tellers and customer service reps (CSRs). When you think about the enormous level of investment and time involved in recruiting and training skilled CSRs to handle customer transactions, it becomes quite clear this is not a novelty.

There is a large amount of turnover in any CSR division - these employees have to be good at what they do, but they will also likely move on to other positions within the enterprise, or go elsewhere to do a similar job. Whether you are talking about banking and financial traders, travel agents, product support, cable television, or any system requiring a lot of personal attention, the company sinks millions of dollars into building education labs and getting all those reps up to speed on every key scenario they must support.

The training system for a customer-driven enterprise must be as sophisticated as the actual live systems, if you are going to train these people to do the job right. Or at least it should LOOK as sophisticated. Simply screen-scraping a system with rote answers is usually not enough realism to teach a complex interactive task. You need the underlying data to support the task you are training for. For instance, if a check deposited after 3:00PM needs to be shown as clearing the next morning, that's precisely how the system should respond to the trainee.

This is where Service Virtualization comes in. Using LISA to capture thousands of transactions between the CSR terminals and the underlying customer databases, transaction systems and mainframes (this could also be done from system logs), a Virtual Training Environment (VTE) is created, which behaves and responds almost exactly like the real thing. Part of the VTE is a Test Data Management component, where things like customer account numbers are "sanitized" to protect private customer data, while still being formatted in a realistic way for training purposes.

Best of all, once these VTEs are created, they can be reset again with the appropriate scenarios almost instantaneously for each student, with no waiting for manual configuration, no new infrastructure setup and costs, and no impact on the live back-end systems. If you are looking for a little more detail on this project, you can read LISA Case Study: Virtual Training Environments at an Interstate Banking Firm here.

While Virtual Services are becoming the go-to solution for eliminating constraints from software dev & test labs, this is not the only time we've seen them used in a completely non-software-development context, and we love seeing innovation in how customers apply the technology. Stay tuned for more Cool Stories from the Field over the next 3 weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Now Hiring at iTKO - Job Update

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

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

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

The World Finally Seems to Get the DevTest Cloud Idea

We're going to continue this week with more interesting things we've heard customers and partners say about best practices for employing DevTest Cloud practices to solve big, hairy software problems.

Last week we were at STARWEST 2010 in San Diego, and the attendance was about double last year's draw. More than 250 QA professionals stopped by, and many of the managers said "I was specifically asked to find out how to virtualize my test lab" or "We are looking for a way to take our SDLC to the Cloud" or "I know we are moving to a federated Cloud solution for our defense projects and we need to be involved" - referring to the government's Forge.Mil initiative we discussed here recently.

Heady stuff, because in previous years most of the questions at these shows were about testing specific protocols and interfaces such as web services, web 2.0 UIs or TIBCO, etc.

From our bizdev man Scott - he made one call to a potential customer, and he was already thinking DevTest Cloud. Check out an excerpt of what this guy sent out to his team, telling them all to get familiar with the concept -- before he'd even finished the first page of our recent whitepaper about virtualization in the DevTest Cloud:

If you glance at the executive summary of their white paper, they seem to address the issue of the various independent systems required to make up a test/development environment. From my high level discussion, I learned that they do this via simulation rather than reproduction of the external system. Having a solution to simulate external dependencies would be of great benefit for repeatable tests and to quickly reproduce a whole environment. I think it is very interesting.

All of the aspects that make Cloud enticing - elasticity, on-demand resources, provisioning as a "utility," multi-tenancy and low-cost capacity, make DevTest Cloud especially interesting, because it truly allows teams to work in parallel, while avoiding the constraints of huge costs and delays created by waiting for unavailable or live system dependencies to be available in their environments.

We too find it very encouraging that when enterprise IT thinks Cloud, they are starting to also think of software Development and Test as an essential function of the Cloud, rather than merely Cloud Computing as a deployment option.

 

2010 - The year we met DevTest Clouds...

Today we released a new version of the whitepaper: "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Application Development" -- and aside from looking really good (kudos to the designers), it contains a whole lot of new thinking about how we should best bring enterprise software development into the Cloud age.

If your enterprise has a Cloud initiative brewing, there is not a higher value lever to pull right now than optimizing development and testing activities in the Cloud. You should find out what DevTest Cloud platforms can do to bring the elasticity of Cloud to the software lifecycle: on-demand dev & test environments, with ready capacity at exponentially lower costs.

This is just a start, as we believe 2010 will be the year of the emergence of DevTest Cloud platforms. Leading vendors such as IBM, VMware, Citrix, Amazon and others are delivering elastic, on-demand infrastructures that are more than just places to host applications. We'll continue demonstrating how enterprises will be able to build their own DevTest Cloud platform that leverages these solutions.

Look for more blogs from us on this vital practice, as well as new videos, new press and articles, customer stories, and an appearance from John at the upcoming Cloud Computing Expo 2010.

You can get a copy of this paper, and find all the latest DevTest Cloud resources from iTKO here: http://itko.com/cloud.

Development vs. QA Video: "It Works on My Machine!"

Here at iTKO we know better than anyone that software development and testing is not all fun and games. But it can be pretty funny when you look at this dialogue between our little avatars Cass (QA) and Eric (Developer) - a back-and-forth that we've lived and seen played out in IT departments and software development shops around the world. See anything familiar here?

We find in most enterprise software shops, as many as 60% of bugs reported by QA are not accepted or rejected by Development as invalid or "not repeatable." An amazing amount of time is wasted on issue acceptance and defect resolution processes. This is exactly why we came up with LISA Pathfinder, which allows any tester to immediately capture and report an issue with just one "alt-click."

QA teams need to focus on testing functionality, not attempting to make the case to development whether or not a bug actually exists. And Developers need the full transparency of a complete stack trace - not just what the tester saw on the screen, but every single thing happening behind the browser, and repeated in the exact state that reported error condition occurred. We hope you like the video and maybe see a parallel in your own organization!

Bringing Virtual Efficiency to Utilities - On IBM developerWorks Cloud Zone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Webinar: "4 Catalysts for Optimizing Software" with Cognizant, 5/27

Let's preview an upcoming webinar we have scheduled with our partners, Cognizant, this Thursday May 27th at 10:00AM Central, titled: "The 4 Catalysts for Optimizing Enterprise Software Development and Testing." Cognizant's AVP of Testing, Satish Thiagarajan and Global Head of Testing Sumithra Gomatam, along with our founder &Chief Geek John Michelsen.

This webinar (sign up here) will assume you already know about today's distributed, "modern" architectures such as SOA, BPM, SaaS and Cloud computing deployments. What will be discussed are the 4 "catalysts" or inflection points that can bring on huge acceleration in the speed of delivering and testing software applications in today's environment. In a nutshell, these techniques are:

• Elimination of dependencies with Service Virtualization;
• End-to-end functional and regression test automation;
• Highly available, unconstrained Performance Testing;
• Faster defect collaboration between QA and Development.

We've had success working with Sumithra and Satish's teams both in the US and in India, and we hope you can join iTKO and Cognizant for this free session to learn more about these change agents in your software lab. Feel free to bring your questions and we will address them all (either on the call or immediately after!)

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.

Why iTKO is Moving Gracefully to the Cloud

You might have noticed our site, our webinars, our advertising, and this blog, appearing with a renewed emphasis on Cloud Applications. Indeed, iTKO is "Moving Gracefully to the Cloud." But why now?

Our LISA software is already well-established as a way to Virtualize service behaviors to eliminate the constraints of unavailable or incomplete systems - and that is a next generation of Virtualization that is a meaningful, unique, and growing technology for us to be involved in.

And not to toot our horn too much, but we were already winning customers and awards years ago for Validating and Testing heterogeneous apps, including SOA, web services, ESB-based integration layers, enterprise Java, CORBA, what have you. We have every intention of continuously improving our coverage on that front.

So when we now talk about Cloud Apps, we do so quite deliberately. We aren't another company trying to hitch ourselves to the latest hype cycle, or give lip service to the latest sector. We only wanted a role in the Cloud story if we were a significant, important part of the vendor community, helping enterprises develop truly elastic, quality, high-performing Cloud Applications that meet customer needs. And all of the things we have done for "modern apps," SOA, business process validation, performance testing, and rich UI testing, are part of that journey to better development of Cloud Applications.

Here's a perspective on why iTKO helps companies "Move Gracefully to the Cloud" from our founder John Michelsen.

Hidden Costs Off-the-Cloud: iTKO ChalkTalk

OK, here's the last of our little whiteboard series on Development and Test Clouds. What are some of the hidden costs that are not improved by the use of elastic Cloud Computing based images for dev and test environments? iTKO founder John Michelsen discusses how these off-cloud fees and constraints can hinder the value of Cloud application development.

Cloud applications -- at least most of the ones that would support any complex enterprise goal -- do not mean simply sticking a VM on EC2, or "doing your SOA" in a Private/Public Cloud. Before you deploy successfully in the cloud, you have to develop successfully in the cloud. Taken together, you can see how the challenges of:

1. constrained or unavailable services and images, or "wires hanging out" of the cloud;
2. volatility of demand from development teams, and constrained capacity of cloud-based application resources; and
3. hidden costs that are unacceptable for dev & test organizations

can really hinder the incredible gains in flexibility and cost savings we expected from moving our application development and testing lifecycles to the Cloud. We hope you enjoy these occasional video series, and welcome your comments or recommendations for future topics you'd like to see us cover.

Chalk Talks: Validation 101 & 102

For this week's Chalk Talk installment, founder John Michelsen revisits what Validation means to today's modern application lifecycle. It is a crucial part of any well-governed software architecture, one that is still too often neglected, once the project test and release cycle is complete.

This first installment covers the basics of Validation ("Validation 101"):

Next, John talks about how we apply this practice using LISA Validate:

We are always looking for more topics, customer stories and problems we can address, so if you have a question for us to answer in our upcoming Chalk Talks, please comment here or contact us.

Chalk Talk: Service Virtualization 101

Time for the next installment of our iTKO Chalk Talk Series. What is Service Virtualization and how is it unique from existing forms of hardware virtualization? iTKO's John Michelsen provides an updated primer on the practice of virtualizing the behavior of constrained systems.

iTKO Chalk Talk - Service Virtualization 101 - John Michelsen (3:30)

We have found a greater understanding in the IT community over the last year of how Service Virtualization is a next logical step after the value companies already achieve with Hardware and OS Virtualization. Service Virtualization solves for the kinds of applications you can't easily replicate and drop on a VM for use while developing your own apps - they could be third party Services that you don't have control or access to, "big iron" systems like mainframes and systems of record, and even components that are under development.

 

2010 iTKO-TV "Chalk Talk" Series - Episode 1: Why LISA?

Yes, we're rolling with a new season of educational "Chalk Talks" on how companies can reduce software time-to-market and costs through the practices of Service Virtualization, Continuous Validation and more. For the first one, let's set the stage with an introduction to the high-level problem we are trying to address. Here, John Michelsen discusses "Why we built LISA" and the business challenge that is driving our practices.

Look for future videos from iTKO this season, including even more practices learned from the field. As always, we welcome your feedback and ideas on topics you'd like to see covered - so contact or comment to me here.

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 Chalk Talk: Event-Driven SOA

How do you ensure successful delivery today's distributed SOA types of applications, when you don't even know exactly how they are structured? Understanding the challenges of an "Event Driven SOA" model means discovering when and how decoupled applications kick off business processes, and how to validate that the business process is complete as messages cross several technologies.

iTKO Chalk Talk: "Event Driven SOA" (2009, YouTube video 5:57)

iTKO LISA founder and Chief Geek John Michelsen describes how Event-Driven SOA came to be a common architectural pattern in today's modern, distributed business applications, and how testing and validation needs to answer the quality challenges inherent in governing these kinds of apps. Example from the Insurance industry discussed.

Look for more educational and interesting video from iTKO soon. We are getting ready to shoot our next season, so if you have deep questions or topics you'd like use to cover, tell us about it at news[at]itko.com.

iTKO Chalk Talk: What is Validation vs. Testing?

Welcome back to another issue of iTKO Chalk Talk. This episode focuses on the discipline of Validation of complex, distributed integration environments, with an example specifically from one of our Defense partners.

We've mentioned before that the US Government is leading the way in many aspects of IT governance (or SOA Governance) - of which Validation is a key component. With so many mission critical systems to support, Validation means more than just business continuity, in this sense it can mean saving lives both at home, and for the warfighter abroad.

iTKO Chalk Talk: What Does Validation Mean? (5:15, YouTube video)

Software Validation is unique from testing - it deals with the need for business and service level continuity of systems, as opposed to a testing checkpoint that occurs along a software release cycle. Validation is what we need to do to ensure that our systems, once tested and integrated, stay healthy - even as underlying services and customer usage patterns change.

Our LISA Validate solution works with many of the leading tools for IT Governance and operations monitoring, such as SOA Registry/Repositories, ALM platforms, performance dashboards, what have you. Pick a set of tools that works for your environment. In the end, validation is not really about the software, it is about making the commitment to ensure that critical applications have the continuous attention and quality coverage they deserve.

Safer Computing Environments at iTKO

File under "Day in the Life" - Our good buddy Reid-O just got an office makeover courtesy of some overzealous techies - he should enjoy his new ergonomic, safe computing environment. This is what you get when you are out creating valuable solutions with global partners!

People are Still Testing User Interfaces

So the heyday of UI testing is over as far as enterprise software is concerned, right? In modern apps, the meaningful business logic happens behind the webpage, in the service-to-service integrations that serve up the appropriate dynamic data. Testing the UI is out of fashion.

Well not exactly. While one type of manual UI acceptance testing faltered, we see another kind of UI testing taking its place. As much as it is true that there are an increasing number of connections and activities going on "behind the glass" that must be tested, it never will replace the need for thorough testing of the user experience. Why is this?

Enter RIAs, or Rich Internet Applications. For a while, serious business applications that leveraged the Internet largely treated the web page as a "request interface" - you enter all the information into a form, submit the page, and it makes a request to the web server, which gets the necessary information from the app server after plenty of back-end processing. Due to performance and latency issues, as well as some rather buggy initial "rich UI" approaches over the last 10 years, it was a lot safer to keep the browser-facing functionality rather simple.

Therefore, testing the UI became of diminishing value in web apps. We needed to validate the back-end systems - the messaging queues, business processes and systems of record. A symptom discovered in the UI meant you were very late to the game in testing.

Now the UI is shifting back into balance in the testing world with RIAs. As customers expect easier and ever-richer user experience on the web, development teams (and the community at large) have moved some of the business functionality back into the browser, to allow customers to more interactively make choices. Technologies such as AJAX, Flash/Flex, Java Swing, Silverlight and other tools have replaced some of the buggy and slow web UI tools of the past. REST-style approaches further advanced the architecture of richer functionality in the front-end.

With this change comes a renaissance in the practice of UI testing. As seen here, one RIA screen such as a trading or entertainment portal may look like one web page to the user, but actually represent hundreds or thousands of separate requests to different servers that populate that page with content. A mere user click or mouse-over on the screen can again, represent several calls from the browser for dynamic data to be displayed. And unlike the late 90's, these customers are not going to wait a few seconds to see results. Lagging performance, displayed glitches and inaccuracies will send the user elsewhere in a heartbeat.

• It takes both human insight: "What is a good user experience and is that what I'm seeing as I test?" AND;
• A whole lot of automation: "How can a tester possibly automate the tests I've already done, while remembering to cover all of the dynamic permutations of content that could be displayed in this RIA screen?"

We've been doing a lot of research in this area, and we've posted some new material on LISA Solutions for RIA and Web 2.0 User Interfaces on itko.com, if you are interested in this topic. Customers are bringing UI testing into harmony with service-based testing and validation approaches.

iTKO Chalk Talk - Test Data Management

Here's a new feature of the iTKO Blog we hope you enjoy - a series of educational "Chalk Talk" short videos covering topics like Software Quality, SOA Governance, BPM Validation, Testing, Cloud Computing and more. This first one features our founder and Chief Geek, John Michelsen. He has a way of pushing a marker that really makes gritty enterprise software topics seem very approachable, so here's his first installment on the challenges of Test Data Management:

One topic that has been on the tip of most of our discussions and recent posts these days is that of virtualization as a solution for Test Data Management (or, "vDTM" as I like to call it...). This form of vTDM is important because it allows your test and development teams to virtually manage test data outside of the system of record.

We hope you find our new Chalk Talks engaging and informative, and look for more video from iTKO soon. If you have any topics you'd like us to cover in the future, send us a note at info@itko.com.

Virtualizing Over-Utilized Systems: Part 6 - Customer Examples & Conclusion

This is the sixth post in our series based on the new whitepaper "The Next Frontier for Virtualization: Over-Utilized Systems" by iTKO (Ahrens, English). In this issue we cover how companies are applying Service Virtualization to solve for over-utilization of core systems and services needed for testing and development.

Examples of how SV Answers the Challenges of Over-Utilized Systems:

Solving a Common Bottleneck – When each team can get their own replicated test environment and data provided as a Virtual Service at minimal cost, there is no longer a need to compete for testing time during a small availability window, much less secure a capital expenditure just to get access to a hosted service-based system.

Customer Example: A leading US airline replicated much of the functionality of a partner’s reservation system that charged high per-use fees when used for testing purposes, as well as restrictions on usage due to the fact that millions of transactions needed to be handled on the system daily. Switching to a virtual service model of the system allowed multiple teams to have their own stable environment and data for test scenarios, as well as saving millions of dollars annually (up to $12M)  in non-revenue-generating access fees for the live service.

Solving Improper Capacity – Trying to pinpoint the reason for functional errors and performance problems in a modern distributed software architecture is becoming increasingly difficult. IT departments can seek to throw more hardware and software at the problem, but that cannot solve the costly and time consuming software setup and configuration effort of enabling test and pre-production environments for multiple distributed teams to use.

Customer Example: A leading bank which has grown by acquisition found that they could not effectively load test middleware which tied more than 70 acquired systems together using their existing tools. They had several developers attempting to hand-code “stubs” and “responders” to replicate the environment for 2 years, with little success. Using Service Virtualization techniques, two test engineers configured realistic models of the current bank middleware systems.  They replaced the multi-year “stub” project in a few months and grew the practice to include another half-dozen teams across the bank. They have avoided up to $30M in costs for provisioning new environments over the course of a year.

Solving Inefficiency – Every business faces increased pressure to meet customer and regulatory demands with greater agility, and leveraging distributed software components and integration frameworks can add agility to our ability to deliver expected business outcomes. At the same time, the service-oriented approach to delivering software makes it harder to ensure service level performance and quality, due to an increased rate of change in the environment.

Customer Example: A US Federal agency needed to prove that their technology selections and architecture elements were performance ready, before they were put in place in the live environment. By virtualizing the rest of the environment and its expected response times and load variability, they were able to compare benchmarks and select the appropriate technology for their architecture, without needing to “bang” on critical live systems used for weather, air traffic and defense purposes.

Summary

Hardware virtualization is becoming ubiquitous in large enterprises, offering immediate cost savings and efficiency. While the concept of desktop and server virtualization has great value for optimizing less utilized systems, it is challenged in replicating heavily utilized or constrained systems such as mainframes, incomplete components, or third-party services.

Consider how much you invest in “under-utilized” hardware and desktop OS infrastructure, versus the high cost of integrating and maintaining traditional software test environments. There's a high probability that the development and integration cost of those traditional test environments exceeds your hardware costs by several orders of magnitude. The prohibitive expense of software test environments means applications are not tested early or often enough, which leads to even costlier failures in production. Virtualization of the behaviors of over-utilized systems can address this serious shortcoming.

Instead of copying the contents of a hard drive or replicating a piece of software running in an OS, Service Virtualization focuses on modeling the communication paths “between the boxes” – components such as web services, databases, RESTful services and asynchronous messaging. This lets teams break their dependencies on the bottlenecks which are preventing them from getting their jobs accomplished.

Development and testing teams need access to an ever-increasing number of services and systems of record that are not readily available. Service Virtualization is a strategy for letting teams take the principles of virtualization beyond the data center, simulating more distributed, complex environments, where significant value remains to be realized.

This concludes our series on SV and Over-Utilization. I'd like to thank Ken Ahrens for coming up with this unique way of looking at virtualization. We hope you find parallels of over-taxed and unavailable systems within your own environment that offer similar opportunities for efficiency improvement.

Virtualizing Over-Utilized Systems: Part 1 - A new concept

One of our really savvy Architects Ken Ahrens recently had an Aha! moment while visiting a financial institution. The customer was asking how our definition of virtualization was different than the more commonly known types of hardware and desktop virtualization already happening in most IT shops.

That's when it hit him: You are already familiar with virtualizing under-utilized systems -- servers and specific desktop OS configurations that don't need as much dedicated hardware and capacity as expected. That's certainly useful for trimming some IT costs.

But what about the over-utilized systems -- those critical and costly applications, services and mainframes that are just too big, or too remote to be replicated on a VM? The over-utilized systems represent a lot of cost, and big constraints for our ability to deliver and test software. Surely there must be a way to virtualize these too?

Well after a lot more analysis on this topic with Ken, we have a new iTKO whitepaper, "The Next Frontier for Virtualization: Over-Utilized Systems," that addresses how companies can identify and start to virtualize these over-utilized systems.

We'll be posting some additional notes and excerpts from the paper explaining the concept here in the future as well.

HP to Resell LISA Virtualize - The News

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned for more news about this partnership here.

Recent coverage of the announcement (in progress):

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

Talk about Service Virtualization at HP Software Universe '09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Showing some ERP mettle for SOA with SAP

So many of our customers have large-scale ERP packages like SAP or Oracle that form the IT foundation of the enterprise.  While at the outset this sounds like a simple architecture, given that you are working with a single vendor over a longer timeframe, in fact these systems are themselves rife with complexity and heterogeneity.  And so many applications now connect into the ERP via various forms of adapters and message buses, that you end up with the classic alphabet soup of technologies at play.

"iTKO/SAP Whitepaper: Validation & Virtualization of SAP Enterprise SOA Applications with iTKO LISA"

This new paper iTKO co-authored with SAP, after working with them in their labs, helps customers see just how valuable a service validation and virtualization offering can be in these environments.  By SAP’s own calculations, customers spend millions of dollars every year standing up and maintaining development and test labs for SAP, even when running on virtual hardware.  And when they need to perform complex integration and load tests with other systems, millions can become $10s of millions to support these environments.  

Our strategy of virtualizing the services layers of these complex applications in a VSE (Virtual Service Environment) like LISA offers is a great way to eliminate those costly constraints, and make it practically zero cost to stand up. This approach is great for our software partners like SAP, and especially for the end customer. After all, we all want to focus IT budgets and especially our integration and innovation efforts toward technologies that contribute revenue to the bottom line, and not manual support and configuration costs that aren't repeatable.

Yes, even big ERP is getting nimble for SOA. We expect even more collaboration with SAP and other software partners to better improve quality and agility for customers with Virtualized Services. You can also find the paper posted by co-author Joerg Nalik Ph.D. on SAP's Developer Network and COIL blog here: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/14083.