The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

ITKO retrospective with John & Shridhar in D Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant

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

iTKO News: Record Results for 2010

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

iTKO Completes 2010 with Record Growth and Profitability

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

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

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

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

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

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

SearchSOA Editor's Notebook: DevTest Clouds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Hidden Value in Test Data Virtualization

As you've seen in recent posts here, most of our discussions around Service Virtualization center around the lack of availability of systems, environments, etc. -– i.e. the "Over-utilized" problem. A Virtual Service Environment (VSE) is a solution that helps eliminate these constraints and therefore can dramatically reduce the time to market, and/or infrastructure costs. Also, once these constraints are removed, testing (functional and performance) can be done much earlier, and therefore greatly improve the quality of the released software.

We also talk about the use of VSE to enable parallel development. Being able to simulate dependencies that don't exist, and allowing testing and development activities to happen in parallel. Again, this can greatly reduce time to market, costs and improve overall quality.

However, there is a value of VSE that we don't talk as much about. An issue that has applicability in almost every enterprise environment, is one related to Test Data challenges. Let me explain.

There are at least 4 Test Data related challenges that Service Virtualization helps solve or assuage:

1. Data Scenarios are difficult to create. In the modern application, data required to support scenarios will have to be synchronized across multiple systems. Not only is that highly time consuming, but due to access constraints, or skill constraints, or various other reasons, creating and synchronizing that data could become a near impossible task. This may either elongate the testing cycle or, even worse, encourage the testers to reduce the number of scenarios that the system is tested under.
2. Data is Volatile. This is partially related to (1). In a lot of cases, the systems being tested go directly against systems that are either in-production or are being shared by other teams. This causes the data to be volatile (changing randomly and often). This makes the testing process impossible, because any results of the testing against these volatile systems cannot be validated.
3. Data needs to be Desensitized. In a lot of cases, data challenges could be reduced by using production data. However, production data may have sensitive information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. Not only is this a problem for the direct employees, the challenge is greatly magnified when offshore or outsourcing contractors are used.
4. Data should not impact production systems. Some test scenarios result in transactions being created that can mess up a production system. For instance, if a test scenario requires a new order getting placed, the order once generated will have to be traced and deleted from the production systems. This is a major pain for the testers, and for the operations personnel.

As you can see from the above examples, Test Data Management challenges represent a huge constraint on the productivity of almost any enterprise software development project of significant scope.

Here's how we have found customers can approach these challenges using Service Virtualization:

• Reduce the number of points that need to be synchronized, by capturing relevant transactions, chaining them together into scenarios, and creating a virtual model that can be manipulated without programming.
• Stabilize the data so that the test results are actually valid, for instance, maintaining the relevance of variables like changing dates and varying types of customer data entry.
• Desensitize the data so it does not violate security and privacy policies.
• Substitute a Virtual Service for the production system, so there is no need to impact the critical live system of record to retrieve data. This can be done alongside ALM tools and Service Registries for SOA - essentially routing a known test data request to the VSE instead of the real thing.

In this arena of virtualization, we have been amazed by how widespread these shortcomings are in test data management, with little recognition of any available solution for them. We believe our LISA Virtualize uniquely supports these practices, with automation for capturing, modeling, desensitizing and maintaining virtual test data.