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

CA LISA Application Delivery Sessions at CA World '13

We are hard at work getting ready for our second run at CA World 2013 since being aquired. Over the past 18 months we have added many new customers and are excited to have many of them tell their stories to the CA World audience.

Below you will find the Application Delivery Track sessions at CA World '13. This includes Service Virtualization, Agile Cloud Delivery solutions and DevOps-focused content. Each session is described in greater detail by clicking the links to the catalog.  

If you are attending CA World, come join us and learn the latest about CA LISA, and how it is being applied in today's complex IT world. 

Helpful tip:   If you want to import the below information to your calendar/phone, click here to add this schedule to your device.

Mon Apr 22	10:00am	Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience is a Key Catalyst for IT Transformation Mandalay Bay Ballroom KL	Michael Sargent - General Manager, CA Technologies
	11:15am	Focus Area Opening - Innovate Faster with Continuous Delivery and Service Virtualization for DevOps Mandalay Bay Ballroom KL	Shridhar Mittal, CA Technologies
	2:30pm	Qualcomm: Innovating New Features - Virtually Delivering Faster, Without Fail Breakers L	Scott Jackson - SW QA Engineer, Staff, Qualcomm Inc
	2:30pm	Partner Session - Accenture and CA Technologies Drive Service Virtualization Adoption Across the Enterprise Breakers K	John Pickering - Managing Director, Accenture; Michael Weinstein - Manager, Accenture
	3:45pm	Customer Session - Reforming the Approach to Application Development & Quality at Blue Cross Blue Shield Minnesota Breakers L	Jacki Dykhuizen - Software Quality Manager, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota
	3:45pm	Accelerate - Innovate Faster with Application Delivery in Cloud and Virtual Service Environments (CA LISA Release Automation - Nolio software demonstration) Breakers K	Doron Gerstel, Eran Sher, CA Technologies
Tue Apr 23	8:30am	Using and Managing Service Virtualization with Production Data Mining for High­ Performance Applications Breakers L	Chris Kraus - Sr Principal Product Manager, CA Technologies Ken Ahrens, CA Technologies
	8:30am	Customer Session - New Channels for Parallel Delivery and Quality with CA LISA at DIRECTV Breakers K	Robert Kelman - Sr Mgr, ITSD Tools & Architecture, DIRECTV
	10:00am	Continuous Delivery with CA LISA Suite: Accelerating Innovation from Design to Release Breakers L	Ruston Vickers, CA Technologies; Kalyan Kumar (KK) - VP & Chief Technology Architect - HCL Technologies - ISD, HCL TECHNOLOGIES LTD
	11:15am	Service Virtualization - How to Save Money, Simplify the Environment, and Reduce the Impact of Downtime Breakers L	Angela Goff - Manager, IT Applications, Nationwide Insurance
	11:15am	CA LISA in a Cloud, a New Version of Center of Excellence for Testing Breakers K	Robert Linton - VP Appl. Lifecycle Management, CorTechs Inc.; Steve Mazzuca, CA Technologies
	2:30pm	Customer Panel - Best Practices for Agility and Continuous Delivery with Virtual Environments Breakers K	Jacki Dykhuizen - Software Quality Manager, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota; Laura Miller - VP Global Product Development, FirstData
	3:45pm	Customer Session - Sprint Virtualizes Everything, Even Partners and Training Environments Breakers L	Todd Schuster - Applications Developer III, Sprint
	3:45pm	Lab: CA LISA Hands­On Introduction Session Surf AB	Chris Kraus - Sr. Product Manager, CA Technologies
	3:45pm	Enterprise Cloud - No More Excuses Breakers K	Eli Almog - CTO - CSC Cloud, CSC
	5:00pm	Invite only	Meet CA LISA Advisors and References
Wed Apr 24	8:30am	Ensuring User Adoption for CA LISA Breakers K	James Grigolite - Program Director, CA Technologies
	8:30am	Analyst Session - voke - Results Across the Lifecycle with Service Virtualization Research Breakers L	Theresa Lanowitz - Analyst, voke, inc.
	10:00am	Mobile Enterprise Apps: Real World Best Practices to Accelerate Mobile App Development & Delivery Breakers L	Jonathan Lindo - VP, Software Engineering, CA Technologies
	11:15am	CA LISA Pathfinder Introduction - New Frontiers in Dev & Test Automation Breakers L	Min Fang, CA Technologies
	11:15am	Lab: CA LISA Hands­On Introductory Session Surf AB	Chris Kraus - Sr. Solution Architect, CA Technologies

High-Velocity Healthcare Application Webinar - CA LISA and CA APM

We're looking forward to an upcoming webinar featuring some of the most compelling service virtualization customer stories we've encountered in the Healthcare (insurance, medical and government sector) industry.

As the major players and Payers in healthcare move toward new regulations and Federal and state exchanges, the impact on their software development and IT Operations efforts will be huge. How can these two teams within each enterprise work together more closely, and become Agile enough in delivering new functionality to make it through the challenges they will face over the coming year?

Join Harris Corporation's Mark Waterloo, and hear how he's part of a performance and agility transformation using SV and APM together at one of the world's largest health organizations. And stay for frequent CA community contributors Jason English and Ken Ahrens talking about how customers can develop, test and release software faster, and do so with better performance than conventional methods using CA LISA Service Virtualization along with real feedback from leading Application Performance Management suites like CA APM.

Webinar: High-Velocity Healthcare Application Delivery with Service Virtualization and APM

Run Time: Thursday, Feb. 28. 1:00PM - 2:00PM Eastern

Free sign up: http://servicevirtualization.com/events/ca-healthcare-webinar-high-velocity-with-ca-lisa-and-ca-apm

Bring your questions, and join the ServiceVirtualization.com community of IT and business professionals interested in advancing SV practices.

CA LISA 3-Minute Overview Video: Get in the Fast Lane

Check out this new video from CA, describing how enterprise IT can "get in the fast lane" and avoid traffic "constraints" on software development and testing, with the CA LISA(r) suite of products.

  

There are 3 aspects of CA LISA highlighted here that help businesses overcome complexity and constraints, and deliver applications to market faster:

1. Shift Left. Provide virtual environments and data that allow development teams to move testing left in the timeline. Much earlier testing means each phase of development, system test, integration, etc. is completed faster, and with fewer errors escaping into the next phase.

2. Mainframe Virtualization. Since our ITKO days, LISA has always supported service virtualizing backends and heterogeneous environments that include legacy and mainframe systems (CICS, COBOL copybooks, CORBA orbs, IMS, etc.) but now with CA we support more protocols than ever, and draw on the experience of one of the world leaders in managing these systems. Our SV even resolves constraints between developed components inside the mainframe stack.

3. Ease-of-ROI. Making software usability improvements such as one-click workflows, new controls and the like certainly helps end users get productive with CA LISA faster. But much of ROI comes from having Professional Services teams with a proven methodology for helping customers strategically plan, adopt and measure value from their investment.

Anyway, hope you find this new video useful for quickly explaining how CA LISA can get your application development in the fast lane!

Webinar 12/12/12 on Service Virtualization Value Results with voke - Research & Interpretation

There's a lot of really good market research coming out lately on the evolving practice of Service Virtualization (SV), and this one's particularly interesting because it is the first to cover a lot of companies who are either already aware of SV or using a solution. For instance, did you know that a majority of SV users report a 25% or greater reduction in software delivery cycle times?

That's a lot of value when you think about how many dev/test teams (95%) report spending time waiting on environments... Here's your chance to hear about it first.

Let's interpret these new results with voke senior analyst, Theresa Lanowitz. Her team recently surveyed service virtualization users, managers and decision makers on the types of value they are receiving by modifying their application development practices to reduce development cycle time and increase quality, amid ever-increasing challenges of today's complex apps.

Join Theresa and and Ruston Vickers (CA LISA Technology SVP and founder, ITKO) for this killer webinar on 12/12/12, and get your own free copy of the survey results.

Webinar: Service Virtualization Results, Research & Routes with voke and CA

Date:  Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Time: 1:00 - 2:00PM Central US

Registration is free but limited to servicevirtualization.com members.  Visit their community site and join the SV experts (you will be redirected to login or create an account).

Text link: http://servicevirtualization.com/profiles/blogs/the-value-of-service-virtualization-via-voke

 

News - CA Press Releases Newest Title: "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated"

[From the official press release of book publisher CA Press.]

CA Press Releases Newest Title: "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated"

Book Concisely Explains Service Virtualization and Helps IT Professionals Drive Innovation.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (PRWEB) October 01, 2012: Oracle OpenWorld 2012, October 1, 2012 – CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) today announced the release of Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated, the latest book from CA Press, at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 with a *free book signing.

This book is the first definitive guide to the IT and business practice of Service Virtualization (SV). It illustrates how some of the world’s largest organizations can achieve new levels of agility and efficiency with this unique approach to application development and testing.

Written by John Michelsen, CA Technologies Chief Technology Officer and technology inventor, and Jason English, director of CA LISA Product Marketing at CA Technologies, and editor of the ServiceVirtualization.com website; the book details how the powerful new practice of SV captures and simulates today’s complex applications.

The authors provide real-world lessons learned from organizations that have applied SV within large, complex customer IT environments--including project plans, metrics and organizational challenges.

When adopted successfully to remove constraints in the existing software environment, SV can deliver dramatic improvements to an IT organization including increased speed, performance and agility for the development of enterprise application software.

Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated recounts early attempts at simulations, using examples from past customer projects to help readers understand the ins and outs of SV. Insights culled from interviews with IT leaders detail how they overcame struggles with fostering and driving innovation within their enterprises.

“While Service Virtualization changes the playing field for how companies deliver innovation to market, it is not nearly as difficult to adopt as some might expect,” said Michelsen. “When organizations realize how virtual development and test environments are better than real ones, they not only save money and time, but even improve their job satisfaction levels. IT teams are happier and more productive when they are spending more time on valuable, customer-facing innovation.”

Readers will learn:

• Why IT constraints are the enemy of business agility and how to overcome them;
• The myths and capabilities of SV;
• Industry best practices, case studies and results measurement techniques;
• How SV can be rolled out and used for software development and testing in the cloud.

CA Technologies will host an exclusive Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated book signing event with authors Michelsen and English at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco on October 2, 2012. The event will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. PDT in the Tap and Brew Lounge (#101) in Moscone South. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet with authors and receive a copy of this innovative title.

For more information visit:

•     Reality Is Overrated preview chapter(registration required)
•     Reality Is Overrated YouTube videos
•     Twitter: @ITKO or @svcvirt, or follow #svworks

Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated is available on Amazon for $16.49. eBook versions can be purchased from the publisher Apress. For a limited period, an introductory price is also available. Participants in the ServiceVirtualization.com community can also qualify for a free copy of the book by participating in discussions.

*Special conditions for employees from US government bodies applies – details available on request and at the show.

About the Authors

John Michelsen is chief technology officer at CA Technologies, where he has delivered market-leading inventions delivered in database, distributed computing, virtual/cloud management, multi-channel web application portals, Service Virtualization and more. Michelsen is responsible for CA Technologies technical leadership and innovation, further developing the company’s software strategy and relationships to deliver customer value. He joined CA Technologies in 2011 through the acquisition of ITKO, a company he founded.

Jason English is director of CA LISA Product Marketing at CA Technologies. Jason joined CA Technologies through the acquisition of ITKO, where he served in a number of roles including marketing, software UI design and sales support. Jason is currently focused on CA Technologies customer advocacy and sharing SV best practices and resources through the Service Virtualization community.

About CA Technologies

CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) provides IT management solutions that help customers manage and secure complex IT environments to support agile business services. Organizations leverage CA Technologies software and SaaS solutions to accelerate innovation, transform infrastructure and secure data and identities, from the data centre to the cloud. Learn more about CA Technologies at http://www.ca.com.

Follow CA Technologies:

•     Twitter @CAinc
•     Blogs
•     Social Media Page
•     Press Releases

About Apress
With more than 1,000 books in print and e-formats, Apress is the authoritative source for IT professionals, software developers, and business leaders all over the world. Apress provides high-quality, no-fluff content that helps serious technology professionals build a comprehensive pathway to career success. Since 2007, Apress has been part of Springer Science+Business, one of the world's leading scientific, technical, and medical publishing houses, enabling global distribution of Apress publications. For more information, please visit http://www.apress.com.

Legal Notices
Copyright © 2012 CA. All Rights Reserved. One CA Plaza, Islandia, N.Y. 11749. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

CA Press Contact:
Tariq Ahmed
CA Technologies
Tel:     +44 (0)1753 241 069
tariq.ahmed@ca.com

Apress Press Contact:
Christine Condon
Apress
Tel: 212-620-8021
christinecondon@apress.com

Read the official press release from the publisher CA Press here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/10/prweb9957704.htm

 

Best Buy talks Service Virtualization on Innovation Lumniaries

Check out this excellent video case study from our CA Innovation Luminaries channel. Ian Kelly, Director of Integration & SOA at Best Buy, discusses how Service Virtualization practices enable them to innovate and deliver new software development environments far faster.

 

Customer innovation happens fastest when there is an unconstrained environment to support it, and the best results for SV are measured when it is adopted across multiple groups, working in parallel. Thanks to Ian and the CA Luminaries team for sharing this story.

 

CA taking Service Virtualization Book to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

Big event coming up in San Francisco - join us there! This is your best chance to get a signed copy of the new book the day it comes out ... and perhaps a refreshment.

Here's the media release from CA:

CA Technologies to Showcase Service Virtualization Portfolio and Unveil ’Reality Is Overrated’ Book at Oracle OpenWorld

CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) today announced that it will showcase its Service Virtualization solutions at Oracle Open World 2012 September 3- - October 4, in San Francisco. CA will unveil its newest title, Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated, co-authored by CA Technologies John Michelsen, chief technology officer and Jason English, director, CA Service Virtualization.

CA Technologies will host an exclusive Reality is Overrated book signing event in the Tap and Brew Lounge at OpenWorld2012 and present how service virtualization enables enterprises to develop better software applications.

Special Events for CA at OracleWorld on October 2, 2012:

• 10:15 - 11:15 AM PDT - John Michelsen presents “Reality is Overrated – Enterprise Agile Requires a Virtual World” in Moscone South (Room 236).
• 11:30 - 1:00 PM PDT. Book Signing - Attendees will be able to meet the authors and receive signed copies of the book at the CA Technologies-sponsored Tap and Brew Lounge in Moscone South

Visitors to the CA Technologies-sponsored Tap and Brew Lounge refreshment zone will have an opportunity to meet product experts to learn more about CA Technologies Service Virtualization (SV) solutions during OpenWorld.

Find us there and Follow our media team on Twitter via @svcvirt, #svworks and #oow hashtags.

SV Book Trailer Part 3: No Pain, All Gain

Who says every major gain in IT productivity and efficiency must come with a painful, disruptive price tag of change? It's not nearly as difficult as most changes you've tried. In this video preview the authors of "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated" (Michelsen, English) point out that achieving results with SV is not as hard as you might think.

 

To sign up for updates on the book and read Chapter 4 ahead of time, join the community for Service Virtualization at http://servicevirtualization.com/book - on ServiceVirtualization.com. News, commentary, reviews, upcoming author appearances and interviews will be featured there and on their twitter feed at @svcvirt.

SV Book Trailer Part 2: Virtual Model Boogaloo

Continuing the series of preview trailers for the upcoming book "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated," authors Michelsen, English describe how SV practices reflect a rapid behavioral shift in software development.

 

To check out a sample chapter of the book, join the forum for SV at http://servicevirtualization.com/book - on ServiceVirtualization.com. The latest news and supporting info on the book, including upcoming author appearances and interviews, will be featured there.

Service Virtualization: The Trailer of The Book - Part 1

What is the upcoming "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated" book about, and why do the authors have a problem with reality? Watch the first quick trailer for the upcoming best practices book from CA Press, coming October 2012.

 

To read more about the book, see a sample chapter, and preorder, just visit http://servicevirtualization.com/book - on ServiceVirtualization.com. The latest news and supporting info on the book, including upcoming author appearances and interviews, will be featured there.

Book Preview: "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated" Coming 10-1-2012.

We're virtually chuffed about an upcoming business and technology book -- the first definitive guide to the IT and business practice of SV, titled "Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated" and coming out internationally on CA Press October 1, 2012.

Your authors, John Michelsen and Jason English, recounted early attempts at simulation, plumbed real project data, and interviewed IT leaders from real companies fighting to innovate in a very complex world - using a new kind of fake software. As it turns out, the most successful innovators in this book didn't just depend on a new vendor platform or more boxes in their lab to become more agile and deliver better, faster and cheaper than their competition. They changed their own perception of reality first.

Other industries, from civil engineering, to pharmaceuticals, to aeronautics, understand the need for modeling and simulation using virtual reality throughout design and development of new products. So why has IT fallen so far behind? Every day companies make the headlines and fail the innovation race by delivering software that is late to market, poorly performing and costly to maintain.

This book will get to the root causes of the enterprise's reluctance to adopt Service Virtualization, and recount how leading edge customers have overcome skepticism to achieve new levels of agility and efficiency without the constraints that hold back traditional development.

Not a book strictly for techies, but certainly not for dummies either, Service Virtualization: Reality is Overrated provides valuable management insight into how companies plan SV adoption, and measure results. If you can't read, there are dozens of pretty pictures in here.

Preview Offer at http://servicevirtualization.com/book:

Check out a Preview of Chapter 4 which outlines the challenges that drive the need for Service Virtualization, and see what's in store here. As it turns out, virtual services are better than the real thing, most of the time.

The book will be available in bookstores, Amazon, as well as eBook versions from our publisher apress. Participants in the ServiceVirtualization.Com community can also qualify for a free copy of the upcoming book by participating in discussions.

 

Winning the Service Virtualization Gold at DirecTV

Agile delivery teams are not going to win gold at the track meet this year in London. You won't see synchronized software development and testing teams swimming together in perfect time. Application performance experts won't be sticking the dismount after a high-speed vault. But we do like to think that in some small way, our advances in Service Virtualization may help our customers at DirecTV bring those performances into our living rooms this summer.

Check out this latest video interview with Mike Benson, DirecTV's CIO on how Service Virtualization with CA LISA solutions enabled their company to make virtual dev and test environments available in minutes, not days.

 

Service Virtualization (SV), whether accessed from a developer's laptop, or shared by distributed teams using private Cloud labs, equates to a huge boost in productivity and performance for this entertainment firm's IT development and integration projects.

When the old way of manually configuring test infrastructure and coding mocks is dispensed with, their lifecycle shrinks, and product can be delivered to market faster, with better quality and a competitive price for customers.

Just like the world's premier athletic competition this summer, the stakes for enterprises to continuously innovate and deliver flawlessly have never been higher. Defining moments create the impetus for new and ever-increasing customer expectations, and that equates to big differentiators in a competitive market. By simulating and eliminating constraints from the SDLC, DirecTV has positioned their application development and performance strategy to win.

Sustaining On Our Own Dingo Food: Virtual Services are Forever

We talk a lot about how Service Virtualization enables dev and test teams to optimize performance and eliminate costly functional errors much earlier. But what about the third, and arguably most important leg for a business? Sustainability. That's the final aspect of industrializing the space of simulating or mocking up the systems in our software environments.

On this topic, I heard a very cool product update from our out-back development shack in Australia. Cam -- one of our earliest product dev and support experts, was always the guy who insisted that ITKO as an organization will "eat our own dog food" and exercise the LISA (now CA LISA) product suite to the fullest -- using LISA.

The ability to sustain a system over time is critical, and it is the biggest measure of delivery success for any customers' IT organization. Call it Six Sigma, or insist on less than 5 minutes downtime a year, reduce critical customer errors to <1 report/month, that's the kind of service levels now demanded in production. Your app team can run 80% test coverage of all known scenarios, tune performance to thousands of TPS at release time -- and still have the system blow up sometime in the future.

So, just how solid is a LISA Virtual Service Environment (VSE)? Cam decided to run our standard benchmark VSE service, which is a virtualized web application that maintains state (meaning it maintains a user or account context, rather than simply producing canned responses).

Here's what he found:

"A 20 virtual user test is run continuously. The test is being executed on the same machine as the virtual service. The machine is a vmware instance of Solaris 11 running on a 4-way host with 8gb of RAM. The plan is to keep this machine up as long as possible to demonstrate what is clearly a very stable system.

"The transaction run rate on this machine is about 1200/second. That's not particularly high; the same benchmark gets about 4700 transactions per second on a late model mac book pro. The point of the test here was to prove longevity and stability more than raw throughput.

"By 12 days, we were just over a billion transactions...the performance is constant. The test runner reported 0 errors in the test case, which is specifically designed to detect any session leakage in the VSE. Heap sizes and CPU consumption is stable.

"We are playing both sides of the transaction, and this shows that CA LISA's Test and VSE sides are both rock solid (If anything, we found it to have fewer performance drags than the typical VM images they may run inside!).

"We have LISA test cases driving the VSE and it's a non-trivial test and a non-trivial stateful virtual service. It has to maintain sessions and state for each session. Each individual vuser is looking for evidence of (a) no session state and (b) session leakage -- that a given vuser might be getting data meant for other vusers. The test fails if either condition happens.

"At 62 days we have now reached 6 billion transactions, and we have 0 failures. It's pretty cool."

Pretty cool indeed, Cam. Here's to the development team of LISA for paying appropriate attention to the third leg of reliability: sustainability. And Cam for providing these fun results.

This was just one example of a soak test -- We love to geek out on this kind of thing so stay tuned for more exercises in benchmarking from the CA LISA labs!

6 Top SV Mind Tricks: "These are not the virtual services you are looking for"

We've seen a growing phenomenon of misdirection going on lately in the market of Service Virtualization. Fortunately, last time we looked up Service Virtualization on Wikipedia - someone got the definition right. Thanks to everyone who updated that page and understood the bigger picture here. It can be difficult to maintain perspective when there are so many sources touting different meanings of the words "service" and "virtualization" used together.

What is the reason for such a masquerade, and why would someone describe things that are not virtual services as virtual services? Perhaps this is simply an unintentional mislabeling, but just as often this means someone is selling software or delivery capabilities that are either not ready, or never will become what we define as Service Virtualization.

Here's the top 6 kinds of "Fake Virtual Services" we are not looking for, but getting anyway:

1. Test Stubs as Virtual Services: This is by far the most common fake VS we find lately. The market for Software Testing tools is very crowded and tough, so you will find that any testing tool that allows you to enter a request/response pair as a step within the context of their test, will start calling that stub a Virtual Service. That's a far cry from dynamically built and intelligent virtual services that support stateful transactions, performance characteristics, etc.

2. Virtual Machines as Virtual Services: Conventional virtualization still pops up as a compare-and-contrast with SV. Indeed, those hardware or server virtualization solutions can "Virtualize an Entire Environment" for software development -- IF AND ONLY IF the entire environment is in scope. While they can image hard drives, desktop software and CPUs very productively, VM's cannot handle the heaviest and most constrained assets in your enviroment, nor will they be able to image or replicate anything that is "out of scope" for your team.

3. Manually Built Libraries as Virtual Services: This one may be hard to identify, as it often comes from within your own company or its partners. You may have a team of engineers who have painstakingly coded and maintained their own "Responder Framework" of mock services intended to support the other end of a needed transaction. Inevitably these manually coded elements are brittle and require an ever increasing amount of maintenance over time - leading to the question "Is my team spending time developing and assuring useful functionality -- or managing stubs?"

4. Service Directories as Service Virtualization: Around the time we were rolling out the first SV systems for end customers in 2006-2007, there was another definition floating around among integration vendors that basically called UDDI directories with "pointers" or dynamic links to the locations of given web services objects Service Virtualization. That was correct on the "Service" part and nice for governing or managing services, but it didn't really represent virtualizing anything except for being able to change a link to a WSDL.

5. Cloud-Covered Service Virtualization: This is the latest fad in fake SV. Cloud is great, it is on-demand, has virtually unlimited elastic capacity, instantaneous deployment of servers, reduced cost etc. But it won't eliminate dependencies by itself. If you are doing any heavy enterprise integration work leveraging Cloud, you will also need a robust enough Service Virtualization solution to solve the "wires hanging out" that will still constrain capacity for any serious enterprise software implementation.

6. Outsourced Labor as Service Virtualization: Of all these mind tricks, this one actually made the most logical sense and was the easiest to spot. It simply means you get people somewhere else to be your "virtual assistants" and do things for you. Still popular in practice but fortunately we stopped seeing services firms call it SV or virtual services. I think they just call it outsourcing or contracting services again.

Service Virtualization must cover a lot of ground in order to eliminate the most complex constraints, because they don't happen at any one single point in your architecture. Your best defense is to understand that while virtual services are lightweight, they are not simply generated via a quick slight of hand or misdirection.

Virtual Services should be based on very detailed and intelligent observation of everything your teams must connect to, and scaled to industrial readiness through automation.

Educate yourself on Service Virtualization. You can't fake out a professional faker. Once you are aware of the above "mind tricks," and ask for delivered proof of the real core capabilities of SV, you will much more easily be able to spot fake virtual services when they are presented to you.

And then you can go about your business.

CloudLuminaries Video: Leveraging Cloud & Service Virtualization at DirecTV

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

 

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

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

 

Dubie on Service Assurance Daily: The Best Kept Technology Secret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

Webinar: Parallel Development with Service Virtualization
with Gartner, ITKO (CA) content on http://www.servicevirtualization.com.

Global run times:

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Be Childish about Service Virtualization

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

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

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

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

Putting Service Virtualization to Work takes People, Process, THEN Technology

The last month has been extremely fun here at CA's ITKO campus in Plano, Texas - with a lot of fresh new faces from around the world, including many peers from our favorite technology companies (and competitors) participating in orientation.

When you join an enterprise software company, you fully expect to get a massive dose of product information. But that isn't the whole story - as focusing on the Delivery aspect of our solutions is just as critical as any feature/function talks about LISA software. It's still "People, Process, Technology" in that order for a reason, right?

In our engagements we've found certain organizational decisions that dramatically impact the value a company receives from their software. Without getting into the finer points of ITKO's own value assessment and delivery process - let's take a look at some examples of these.

1. Set value goals for the first Service Virtualization project up front. While it is tempting for a team to kick off the install ASAP and start virtualizing some annoying constraints, don't skip the value goals. The rest of the organization is watching, and will often meter their expectations of SV based on the success of that first project. Setting a goal and measuring the value from the beginning enables your organization to support future projects with confidence.

2. Get the business to buy in, not just IT. While successful Service Virtualization initiatives offer huge efficiency benefits to the IT group, they usually start with executive sponsorship and an alignment to real, customer-facing business objectives. Time-to-Market usually leads the pack here -- because if a business can depend on delivering a critical new product or service to customers 30-50% faster, without fail, the revenue and cost benefits will certainly follow.

3. Don't "give a fool a tool." Sounds like something our favorite character actor Mr. T would say, but he would probably agree that just handing software licenses to a team of developers or testers (even if they are very smart) and expecting them to "figure it out" will not cut it. Even if the software itself is quite intuitive, it must handle very complex tasks. Modeling today's distributed heterogeneous application environments with Service Virtualization does take  planning and training, so that over time the practice can be grown as a core competency of the organization.

4. Expect growing pains. A Service Virtualization implementation should never force your teams to disrupt their development process tools of choice, nor "rip and replace" existing integration and business applications. However, once the ability to "virtualize everything" becomes understood, it will cause ripples throughout the organization.

SV will certainly cause a change in mindset, and raise the bar for delivering faster releases with higher quality. The most highly valued teams will thrive by learning new skills, such as identifying and replacing external constraints, collaborating with more distributed teams to resolve issues and dependencies, and leveraging virtual services for parallel development.

These are just a few adoption trends we've noticed in the field. At ITKO we have a proven strategic delivery practice and roadmap for CA LISA Service Virtualization implementation and rollout, at many of the world's largest enterprises, working alongside leading Services partners. In the "New Virtual" world of Service Virtualization-based software labs, a strong methodology backed by experienced service delivery teams are the key to realizing lasting customer success.

Cloud Chaos for App Dev: Who Should Manage the Change?

We see a lot of enterprise IT teams saying "this year is the year we will take charge of our app dev environments and move them to Cloud."  Indeed, Cloud should empower these dev and test teams, and ease the time and expense of standard lab provisioning practices greatly. We have often said that the best, first application of Cloud is for software development itself.

But what happens if different teams select "Hybrid Cloud" approaches? Or, even scarier, what if the company migrates or evolves their overall Cloud strategy over time, as some of the first generation Virtual Lab Management (VLM) offerings are already being replaced by newer vendors and systems?

What this has done is create a new kind of Cloud Chaos for software development labs: one where you might have each software team spending time configuring and working with various Cloud lab provisioning approaches, instead of focusing on developing and testing functionality that delivers value for the business.

One major energy customer we worked with literally sent 600 developers and testers to Lab Manager training to learn how to provision VM systems - only to find that the next quarter, the IT operations group selected new Cloud infrastructure to replace that system!

We recommend an approach that does not dictate a particular Cloud hosting, lab server virtualization or management platform to give teams access to their software devtest environments - changing the "many to many" issue to a "one to many" capability.

By using LISA's DevTest Cloud Manager (DCM) technology, a company can centralize the provisioning of all Cloud environments through one system, so multiple development teams can get access to all the labs they need - including the VLMs that deliver both server VMs and Virtual Services to simulate off-cloud or "big data" dependencies that cannot be conventionally replicated.

The DCM approach mitigates the consequences of change, and eliminates the need for development and testing teams to know exactly where, or how their Cloud environments are hosted and managed.

End dev and test consumers make a request to LISA DCM and instantly stand up a lab environment that is ready to go, with the systems, test data setups, and virtual services needed for distributed enterprise software development. They no longer need to focus on whether their environment is hosted in a Private cloud with CA's AppLogic, run as a Hybrid Cloud with AutoSuite or IBM solutions, or whether that capacity for a big Performance Test lab gets pushed out to Amazon or MS Azure and managed using VMware tools.

The main point of agile development and testing in the Cloud is to allow teams to focus on high-value activities -- meaning they are building and assuring software that meets business needs, instead of managing and setting up environments. The trend for all companies to move more software functionality to the Cloud will only continue. Let's embrace this high rate of change and increasingly heterogeneous future without sacrificing the productivity of software development.

We appreciate your questions and feedback on Cloud development and testing practices. Look for more articles from ITKO on this topic soon.

 

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.

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!

 

Emergency Alert Message: Seek a Virtual Environment Immediately!

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

ITKO Insights, with Gartner Research, Issue 2 -
Winter 2011 - Ensuring Agile Composite Application Development (Report expired.)


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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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.

 

 

Get the voke Market Snapshot on Lifecycle Virtualization

At CA World today hearing from voke analyst Theresa Lanowitz introducing her latest independent research on the practice of Lifecycle Virtualization. Theresa defines this as a new space that encompasses the existing concepts of Virtual Lab Management, coupled with newer capabilities such as Service Virtualization, Device and Network virtualization that eliminate constraints and costs from software development tasks and enable faster time-to-market.

We've licensed this new report for a limited time, and you can download it here: voke Market Snapshot report: Lifecycle Virtualization (.PDF download, 313K)

The report is especially interesting because it is the first document we've seen that defines a new space of virtualization as it enables faster, unconstrained development and test of today's complex, highly distributed applications. Lifecycle Virtualization encompasses many of the new technologies and practices that enable development environments to work beyond the existing, well-known definition of Application Lifecycle Management (or ALM).

Here's an overview of the research from voke's press release:

The report highlights the importance of Lifecycle Virtualization, which leverages virtualization technologies for development and QA teams to enhance the application or product lifecycle. Alongside desktop and server virtualization, lifecycle virtualization serves as the third pillar in a truly virtual environment. In fact, Lanowitz believes lifecycle virtualization has the power and potential to deliver more impact to the market than both server and desktop virtualization, by finally solving age-old and classic challenges of software development and delivery.

Lifecycle virtualization includes the following solutions such as virtual lab management (VLM), virtualized cloud platforms, service virtualization, defect virtualization, and device virtualization.

We hope you find the free report useful in your planning and research, and look for more articles with voke as this firm continues to survey customers employing this new technology and the practices around it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A High-Velocity Customer Event Retrospective

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

 

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

Three trends that really seemed to emerge:

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

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

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

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

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

Forum: What Don't Companies Get about Cloud?

Recently participated in a forum thread from our friends at eBizQ: "What do companies still not get about Cloud Computing?"

A lot of this uncertainty stems from the old stalwarts of "Is the Cloud secure? Is it scalable?" -- and I think the panelists here debunk those fears pretty well. There are many well-secured ways to take advantage of Cloud, with almost unlimited scalability -- a lot more effort has been put into that at the big public cloud providers than most companies' own web and firewall strategies.

Now, let's get down to SLAs, or service level agreements in the public Cloud - many of which are starting to improve dramatically, while most still pretty much disavow responsibility for interruptions and downtime. Caveat emptor.

That said, Cloud is already happening, and is still going to happen - there is no way to escape the business appeal of provisioning IT resources and software in an on-demand basis. We are seeing many of the world's biggest customers first pooling resources within their own enterprise and rapidly obtaining a Private cloud, while thinking of Public cloud only for the highest capacity or "edges" of their applications.

Here was my take on this topic - read more at http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/08/what-do-companies-still-not-get-about-cloud-computing.php:

"Yeah we gotta do it. But who owns it, and who buys it?" Cloud as a term can cover so many departments and responsibilities within an enterprise.

Is it general corporate IT infrastructure (stuff like shared drives, backups, security & email)? Or is it the company's revenue-driving edge where business functionality is developed and delivered to partners and customers (commerce and differentiated service offerings)?

Often we are seeing larger companies with a more innovative bent hiring a "Cloud Czar" type executive or guru -- with a responsibility to overlay multiple organizations and map out a Cloud strategy. It's not always optimal, but at least then you have someone looking at the bigger picture.

Anyway, we recently had a great little meeting of the minds with some of our customers on this particular Cloud topic as well as the "Czars" and front-line job skills and talent pool of the future in our industry, so look for more interesting material on that coming soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready to Fly at TIBCO TUCON 2011 - Session

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

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

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

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

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

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

News: CA Technologies Acquires ITKO

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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!

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!

Take the voke Survey: What is Agile to You?

"To err is human, to err faster is Agile."

Just got a request to take an Agile Survey from our friends at market analyst firm voke, inc:

We are in the process of conducting a survey on Agile. We will use the data from this survey to create a voke Market Snapshot on Agile, the report will be vendor neutral. I know your customers have very strong opinions about Agile and welcome the participation of as many as possible.

So - here is that survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LNCVQ6H

I took the survey myself and it made me rethink exactly what Agile meant to me - hence the quote at the top. Funny, this comes up almost exactly a year after this blogger commented on Mark Masterson's killer video about Cloud enabling you to fail faster.

Like many terms in the tech world, "Cloud" and "Agile" often get misappropriated for somebody's marketing agenda. But both terms have the intrinsic value of mobility that the business side of the enterprise craves from IT: smaller incremental efforts and costs, and deferred larger decisions, so they aren't going away anytime soon.

I'm quite curious about seeing the results and comments our readers might add to the mix of this survey and the resulting report. ITKO customers generally tend toward the leading edge of what we'd call Enterprise Agile, but we will wager only 50% of them actually refer to their own efforts by the term "Agile." Let's find out!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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.

A few more highlights from Impact (vid)

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

 

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

 

Just Landed from #IBMImpact 2011 - Agility is Smart Business

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

News: iTKO Announces Robert Humphrey as Chief Marketing Officer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full press release on iTKO.com.

DevTest Cloud and LISA Service Virtualization: The Commercial

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

 

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

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.

Two Strategies for Agile Composite Application Development - SV and DevTest

We just put up a new version of iTKO's Cloud paper "Service Virtualization and the DevTest Cloud" that helps clarify that there are two separate solutions we call Service Virtualization (SV) and DevTest Cloud, and while it makes sense to SV in its own right in any integration or testing project, there are also very good reasons to specificially use it for DevTest Clouds. Here's what we mean:

1. Service Virtualization (SV) is the practice of capturing and simulating the behavior, data and performance characteristics of unavailable or incomplete systems or services that constrain the progress of development and test teams.
   
   In essence, this is a "productizing" of the very time-consuming custom stub-and-mock process teams used to try to do for systems they couldn't get access to or easily copy or virtualize in their own enviroments. Obviously this capability has a very broad set of projects where it could be applied - it can speed up a step in a conventional waterfall-type software project, or really streamline things in an agile, SOA/BPM, decoupled approach. Virtual Services can act as stand-ins for functional and performance testing with almost unlimited repeatability, and little setup time and cost. But by the time you get to Cloud, teams invariably find they have even more dependencies, which calls for something new...
   
   
2. DevTest Cloud is a platform for doing software development and testing in a Private or Public Cloud. By nature, this Cloud-based environment allows the computing resources and infrastructure to be provisioned with complete flexibility - elastically consuming them in an on-demand way to allow the project to proceed with less overhead. A DevTest Cloud contains a Provisioning tool for deployment, and conventionally virtualized hardware and system capacity, but it also contains Service Virtualization capabilities.
   
   Without Service Virtualization, that Cloud-based lab would be subject to the same constraints as your in-house test lab environments: dependencies or "wires hanging out" that constrain teams when needed systems are unavailable or unready for development and testing. With Service Virtualization, these components can be simulated to respond with highly configurable response behaviors and times, along with a near-infinite capacity for high-volume performance validation.

I hope this helps explain why we needed to make the distinction in the whitepaper. Service Virtualization is useful to any complex, composite application development and test project, whether or not that happens in a Cloud-based environment. But within a DevTest Cloud, the practice of Service Virtualization is the catalyst that makes it a truly elastic platform without constraints.