The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant

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

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.

Pooling Major Software Costs in Clouds Across Large Enterprises: Will it work?

Found an interesting article from Bob Evans in a recent InformationWeek - major financial firms are working up a cloud consortium to try and negotiate down some of their IT costs by pooling resources. Of course, we are familiar with this concept in government requisitioning, group payer negotiations for healthcare... but how will it work for IT?

"Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle"

True, if anyone has the clout to push the big software vendors to offer them economies of scale, it's banks like Bank of America and Deutsche Bank, and if this were going to happen anywhere, it would be in the Cloud. However, while there may be commonalities between large banks, in terms of the types of workflows and compliance issues they need to support, the enterprise software packages they are likely to be running are very seldom standard one size fits all applications.

I think like many seemingly disruptive changes, this strategy will have more utility for a new class of "shared utility" types of Cloud-based software that represents a small percentage of functionality that can be shared across global banks. This will be like a "toe in the water" to gauge the temperature for a bigger plunge later.

For more strategic operations, the inherent uniqueness of financial systems in different countries, and even global competition, will still require custom purchasing and large service contracts from the software giants, and the SIs that support them. I'll certainly be watching this story in the coming few months to see how it plays out.

Field Stories - Managing Through the Logistics of Change

Here's a new customer story we just completed about working with a leading Europe logistics company on integration and performance testing throughout a comprehensive change process. This large transportation vendor handles both sea and land operations for passengers and freight, and handles a very high volume of traffic through its management and reservation systems.

This situation represents a complete replacement of the custom systems the company cobbled together over the last 20+ years with a completely new solution set, using some of the best-of-breed logistics and TM software packages on the market, along with integration software from Software AG (webMethods) and some Oracle systems of record. In order to get there, this company built a new team to allow a "competency center" around integration, to match the investments it was making in a newer, more scalable platform.

Obviously, with so many critical operations on the line, the integration center immediately identified performance testing as a primary task. They already had individuals attempting to verify response times by testing UI elements such as passenger and ferry reservation websites, with little success, so they turned to the back-end elements, where the harder business process calculations need to be made.

By directly invoking the message broker, integration framework and the system of record behind the browser, they were able to deliver a system that has so far run without critical failures in its first seven months of operations. At the same time by automating the execution of regression and performance test runs, they avoided needing to hire several more testers - estimating a reduction of 33% or more of the testing cost.

You can download the complete story here: http://www.itko.com/resources/europelogics.jsp.

Intermediating ESBs for SOA: The Final Webinar?

OK, sorry to mix metaphors, but it is time to put this can of worms to bed (???). If you've been following this blog you couldn't help but notice the many posts on the apparent ESB vs. SOA controversy. All of this started with an innocent little interview John did for SearchSOA - where the topic of Intermediating multiple ESBs came up. This article created a tornado of posts from some heavy hitters on SOA topics over the last month.

Given all of that, we decided to have our own little webinar on the topic Monday - and we were glad to find dozens of you Chief Architects and senior IT & Dev Managers attending - and asking some great questions about how to rationalize ESBs with their existing technologies, and enable your SOA initiatives going forward.

You can watch an archive of this informal, and informative webinar, with iTKO's John Michelsen, and Chris Kraus here: http://www.itko.com/site/resources/esbwebinar.jsp. Chris demonstrates a little software how-to in the middle of the session for those to like to see the screens.

Hey, are ESBs evil? We don't think so - we've always considered them to be another valuable building block in SOA for many of our customers. The key to success here is making sure you are using ESB platforms, even if they are of different flavors - for doing what they do best in the integration process. An ESB does not make an out-of-the-box SOA. However with good design and architecture principles, and strong validation and Governance, you can mitigate the risks of working with these technologies and bring a lot of your legacy and transactional technologies into the SOA fold with much more ease.

Virtualization of ESB messaging behaviors (and the underlying apps and mainframes they expose) is another way to address these ESB intermediation constraints between teams - say if I'm on the webMethods (SAG) team and need access to the TIBCO team's messaging framework. Or if I'm using Oracle/BEA Aqualogic and need to interact with services exposed through the SAP XI messaging tools. Our counterpart on the other team may want to limit our access to these systems - especially if they are supporting live business requirements. The ability to virtualize away those inter-team dependencies, and have a realistic, stable Virtual ESB earlier in my design/develop/test lifecycles can take away much of the cost and delivery timing constraints inherent in intermediation.

Is this the final time we'll visit this controversy? Maybe not - as long as there is complexity and change in SOA, which is the case for virtually every decent sized enterprise IT shop, there will be a need to rationalize multiple technologies. After all, we have to keep doing business today, despite mergers, compliance changes and new competitive pressures that make us keep bringing in new technologies.

We invite you to sit in on the session and make up your own mind -- and welcome your comments on the content.

Oracle Blogs - Third in a Series on Software Community Blogs

This post on Oracle Blogs is the third in our awareness series on the community blogs of enterprise software firms whose customers we work with on a daily basis. Oracle has a blog community portal - It says, “Welcome to the Oracle blogging community, where Oracle executives, employees, and non-employees alike exchange views about customer requirements and best practices for using Oracle and industry-standard technologies.”  There is a long list of employee and non-employee blogs listed by topic.  Employee blog topics include: Database App Development, Database Management and Performance, Middleware & SOA. The non-employees blogs also have blogs under these topics. There are more topics in both cases. It seems like there are more non-employee blogs and customer activity. Technorati reports 2,523 blog reactions to the Oracle blog community as a whole so it is well read and commented on.

Under the Middleware & SOA topic I found the David Chappell Blog. David is vice president and chief technologist for SOA at Oracle. Chappell has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and is the author of Enterprise Service Bus (O'Reilly, 2004).  I liked his post, ROI by the Ton -- Going Green with SOA, EDA, RIA and Web 2.0, where David discusses the business value of SOA.  He quotes a David Linthicum blog post on "Is SOA Green." We like David and his Real World SOA blog is on our blog list. David wrote, “the more efficient a business is, the fewer resources, natural and otherwise it will consume. Thus, the better the business is automated, and business processes optimized, the more efficient it will be. The primary of objective of an SOA is both efficiency and agility through architectural rejuvenation."

Like David Chappell, we agree with David Linthicum that by limiting "consumption of resources" you are reducing the denominator in the value equation -- so strong automation and reuse directly maximize this return on SOA investment.  He provides an excellent case example from a Verizon implementation of a new Fraud Detection application. As a conventional benefit, the implementation is designed to help reduce power consumption by 99.5%. The new implementation also has 0.5% of its original code - and minimizing the code in deployment to just what is needed reduces the support and maintenance cost of any application drastically over time.

Another blog is SOA Station: Mind the Gap written by Peter O’Brien, a software developer at Oracle in Dublin. He started the blog on his own a year ago and noticed a big bump in traffic when it was added to the Oracle blog community.  Peter focuses on financial services applications. Matt Wright's Blog covers discussions, examples, tips and trick on Service Oriented Architecture from BPEL through to Web Services Management. Matt also works for Oracle. He provides a very comprehensive and interesting post on Using Analytics to Modify In-Flight Processes.

Clemens Utschig writes clemens' soa@oracle blog. Clemens works within the SOA Product Management Team @ Oracle Headquarters. Before moving to the states, he worked for Oracle Consulting Services in Austria, troubleshooting and managing critical j2ee/soa projects within EMEA. Richard Naszcyniec's Blog is written a Consulting Technical Director with Oracle Professional Services where he specializes in system architecture and technology. This gives you a small sampling of the range of the backgrounds, conutires, and professional focus of the Oracle bloggers. The community also includes many consultants outside Oracle who work in the Oracle environment. All in all, a wealth of useful information to mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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