If you are tracking the SOA vendors, you probably recently heard about
Progress Software buying Mindreef (right after picking up IONA the day before as well). So let's take a
minute to talk about iTKO's own view of the
rapid moves and what it means for
the market for software companies like us who are committed to making SOA a
reality.
Clear message: SOAP
testing isn't SOA testing
In one sense this represents consolidation, true, but in another sense,
this proves that focusing on testing a single technology, such as web
services doesn't provide enough coverage for the kinds of heterogeneous
technologies that are inherent in today's SOA architectures, at least not enough
for a company to survive on WSDL/SOAP testing alone. Mindreef was early to the
market with web services testing, but over the past 5 years, we've seen that for
every major enterprise, you also need to test different flavors of ESB, rich Web
apps/RIAs, databases, EJB, CORBA, etc.
Dana Gardner blogged on the details of this acquisition recently, and talked a bit about his view of Mindreef in the light of WS-* testing alone:
"I took my first briefing with Mindreef, given their neighborly
proximity, about three years ago. The seasoned team had a hit on their hands
with SOAPscope, and their timing in the SOA market was great. But I’m not sure
the company grew as was hoped, and perhaps the fast evolution of SOA beyond a
WS-* emphasis played a role. SOAP hasn’t blossomed to quite the degree some
people had forecast."
In fact we have always asserted that SOA Testing isn't a viable space on its own, unless it is tied in with Integration, Governance and Virtualization practices. So this kind of endgame is no different than what we've seen with Solstice for instance (which specialized in functionally testing webMethods ESB only), going to GreenHat (which tests TIBCO ESB); or Agitar (which bet on automating Java developer unit tests only) winding down operations. You need to be able to test and validate across every stage of the software lifecycle, and have the integrations and access in place to do so, across every technology layer to keep the lights blinking for critical SOA applications.
As SOA expert Joe McKendrick noted in yesterday's "Progress makes another SOA acquisition: Mindreef," Mindreef has a better home as a part of the broader solution that Progress (Actional) offers: "With IONA and Mindreef, Progress is clearly aiming to develop and offer an end-to-end suite of SOA products — from integration to management."
The open source market also commoditized some aspects of web services testing - as web services standards start to solidify, an open source tool like SOAPUI meets the needs of developers who don't mind coding some functional tests if they only concerned with testing WSDL/SOAP for compliance checks. This is also why we gave away a free web services only testing version of LISA for a year. And you know what we found? If a company is serious about SOA they will need to go deeper than web services.
Are times hard for iTKO with all this consolidation? Are you getting acquired?
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First of all, here at iTKO we are quite comfortable with our market leadership, awareness and growth. We are coming off a record quarter, record year-over-year growth, and we are reinvesting that in continued research and support, so LISA can be the most complete SOA testing, validation and virtualization framework on the market.
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Second, a BIG part of enabling quality and trust in SOA is in the ability to work with all the leading SOA platforms. Yes, we've seen a lot of consolidation lately, however our CUSTOMERS still have a heterogeneous mix of new and existing technologies to integrate and validate, and we are committed to helping them. So we will continue to partner with and drive quality and virtualization into all the leading SOA platform vendors - including TIBCO, SoftwareAG, SOA Software, SAP, IBM MQ, Oracle/BEA and more. Variety is a good thing for the agility and reuse we expected of SOA, but it presents a big risk. If we can help companies mitigate the risk of all that complexity at a lower cost, that is a good thing.
- Third, we will support Progress customers - for instance we are still the only native Sonic ESB/integration testing solution out there, and we can interact with Actional SOA governance tools within the same framework. We can also Virtualize service environments for Progress customers, so they have a ready SOA test and dev environment without the constraints of access and dependency on a complex SOA environment - whether they use LISA to test, or try Mindreef tools. This coexistence is nothing new for us - many of our customers are also using HP/Mercury and Rational tools and processes and seek iTKO's help for SOA-specific challenges we address.
That's all for
now - of course, we'll still keep up with Jeff
Schneider's "SOA Consolidation" hit list to see if anything is happening we
don't know about ;)
