The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

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.

 

 

Your Middleware ended up in my Cloud!

I recently spotted a really good question from our friend Miko Matsumura on the eBizQ SOA/Cloud forums: "When will the cloud start creating deep impact in the middleware space and what segments will be affected first? Enterprise-to-cloud integration? Web 2.0 Application Infrastructure? Modern Internet B2B? Supply Chain?"

Here's what I had to say on the topic: To date I think there has been a generalization of Cloud as a deployment alternative for production servers, etc, when at first there are few enterprise-level, middleware-enabled business processes that can realistically survive in a Cloud without having "wires hanging out" - constraints of over-utilized systems that cannot be placed in the Cloud.

The pre-integration Cloud you mention - well, the Dev & Test Cloud is going to be a significant area of growth over the next 5 years. It is hard to develop and deliver apps for the Cloud, when there are so many dependencies not available in the Cloud - mainframes, 3rd party apps like SaaS, systems of record and other over-utilized and pay-per-use assets that Development and Test teams simply can't budget for, since their use is highly variable. We will need to find a way to take our middleware processes, and other external constraints, and make them available for integration purposes in the Cloud.

I've made it one of my little missions to better describe this phenomenon with a series of YouTube "chalk talks" there's a series of 4 videos. (See our Solution page for Dev & Test for all 4 videos on the right...)

There's a reason why current successes in the Cloud are kind of consumer-oriented, content-heavy apps, and not as much "big iron" multi-enterprise apps and middleware. Pre-Production clouds will be a necessity for Cloud Apps.

The fears that Cloud Apps are not bulletproof enough for serious middleware and integration use are unfounded - good software, wherever it is deployed, is still up to people: good architecture, elegant development, responsible security approaches and early testing. If we give them the means to do their jobs better in Cloud pre-production environments the success will follow.

Field Stories - Managing Through the Logistics of Change

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

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

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

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

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

iTKO & Cognizant Talk about Software AG Quality - Webinar

We're having an iTKO-hosted webinar Wednesday on a topic we revisit quite a bit, ensuring quality and agility for Software AG implementations. Our Software AG customers have very unique needs - from building and validating next-generation SOA and BPM architectures, to regression testing and virtualizing test labs while conducting an upgrade of their infrastructure to the latest version of webMethods.

iTKO's own Founder & Chief Geek John Michelsen will be joined by an expert from one of our key SI partners from Cognizant, Alfredo P. Reyes, the EAI Practice Head - North America, who will talk about best practice methodologies. This should lead to a very good discussion, so bring your questions.

Registration is free here:
"iTKO Webinar: Reducing SoftwareAG Implementation Costs and Risks with Collaborative Quality Across the Lifecycle"
Wednesday, February 25, 2:00PM Eastern

According to the webinar invitation, "Enterprise software implementations today are up against extremely difficult cost and time constraints. The need for greater cost savings, risk mitigation, quality, and end-to-end control for SoftwareAG/webMethods implementations is driving more customers to evaluate new solutions to optimize their software testing and delivery lifecycle."

Getting ready for SoftwareAG Innovation World: The Tested, Validated & Secured SOA

We're all packed for the upcoming SoftwareAG InnovationWorld 2008 conference in Miami next week. Looking forward to a lot of good dialogue with customers and partners there - last year's was one of the most valuable SOA/BPM/Integration conferences we've seen.

If you're going, check out our session Wednesday morning (10:30am) with Software AG's VP of SOA Products Jignesh Shah, and iTKO's CMO Jim Mackay on "The Secured, Tested & Virtualized SOA."

There is a lot of confusion in the market about where the external concept of Security ends, and where the Validation of secure and appropriate behaviors within SOA begins. In reality, to avoid risk, you need both. Proper Security protocols, and strong management of who is authorized to participate in SOA apps is critical.

But once you have dozens of partners inside the "gate," Validation needs to take over, to ensure that the kinds of Policies that can't be managed structurally are being met. For instance, are participants ONLY seeing the information they should see? Is there a limitation on transaction volume, or being able to edit/delete orders and data? As you can see, there are many Policies to validate within our applications, especially when you have multiple partners consuming and sharing Services.

Then, Service Virtualization adds to the mix by allowing all of the teams to have very "safe" Virtual Services available 24/7 that they can develop and test throughout their own lifecycle, without impacting the performance or security of live business services, or being privy to live customer transactions. Of course the best byproduct of this is the agility and cost savings you can gain, through elimination of constraints throughout the lifecycle of development and testing.

Hope to see you in Miami - perhaps the best place to be in the continental US in November!

First comes BPM, then SOA...

Had a chance to catch a good talk on Business Process Management with our partners at Software AG today.

Mike Lees delivered an extended definition of BPM  in their eyes, and this practice is not centered around technology at all - it is really a management discipline involving the non-technical side of the house, and getting them to understand the "3 A's" (Alignment, Automation & Agility). So, BPM excellence is delivered first as process and later reflected in the software infrastructure.

Another interesting aspect of BPM is the idea of Reuse. Just like the underlying technology in SOA, a defined business process is a piece of metadata that you want to optimize and repeat, especially if it is an effective one. It is interesting to see how "behaviors" and "events" in business can be modeled to meet business needs - they are really more IP than the details of the software itself.

Lastly, I found an interesting "helping-hand" portion of the talk that really hits home - if you want SOA to be a success, get BPM to be a facilitator to SOA. Getting the business teams to think in terms of optimizing, integrating and reusing processes, makes it easier for the IT side of the house to architect and manage their SOA around these vertical and horizontal processes. When interactions between groups, decision points and constraints are modeled successfully, it makes the case for technology that can support it.

It is easy when you are working in the technology/terminology bubble to remember that things like "process transparency" and "optimization" are not about debugging and monitoring the performance metrics of software and integration servers - for the business, they are exactly what they mean.

Intermediating ESBs for SOA: The Final Webinar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Software AG - Fourth in a Series on Software Community Blogs

This post on Software AG is the fourth in our awareness series on the community blogs of enterprise software firms who have products that iTKO customers are looking to test and validate.

First off, the company is part of an SOA community and accompanying platform we support, the Centrasite initiative, which consists of a SOA Registry/Repository, and other management tools. We offer LISA to CentraSite customers as a way to validate Policy so it can be directly enforced, as well as publishing some whitepapers and advice to the community at large.

Software AG has a community site with an invitation to join their Software AG blog. The blog says “Spanning a range of topics from emerging technologies to the latest trends in SOA, BPM and BAM, Software AG blogs chronicle the unvarnished thoughts of Software AG employees. Find out what company leaders, topic experts and guest bloggers think about the technology landscape of today - and tomorrow. Become a part of the conversation by reading and sharing your comments with us!”  While they do not allow non-employee blogs, like SAP and Oracle, you can make comments and join the conversation. They blog was just started in April 2008 and there are 6 posts on SOA governance so far and 5 on SOA. There are nine bloggers so far and their pictures are found in the right column.

The top post when I looked was WOA + SOA + POA = SOA, posted by (our associate since his days when Infravio was merged into webMethods, and then webM into Software AG), Miko Matsumura, Deputy CTO, Software AG with 294 visits. Miko quotes one of our favorite bloggers, Joe McKendrick, who cites Anne Thomas-Manes in defense of SOA success stories, "The issue, Anne points out, appears to be that SOA is still siloed within the IT organization, and the transformative effects have not yet spread to the business. Line of business managers, she observes, are not ready to share services, the crux of SOA value. Anne says so far, she has only come across one company that has been able to connect SOA success to business success, through the establishment of strong positive and negative incentives that encourage people to adopt a better attitude toward sharing."

Miko agrees that SOA is currently overly siloed in IT, and writes that there have to be ways to get the value expressed in business. He puts the answer in the larger context by discussing that SOA is really all of the following: Component Patterns (SOA), Process Patterns (POA), and Human Patterns (WOA). He concludes, “Since SOA is Seismological, consider that it is an inevitability, but only if you look at it in the geological time scale. WOA is sociological and therefore has a greater chance of establishing momentum in the short term. What remains to be seen is if WOA, SOA and POA emerge as a postmodern rethinking of the role of technology in business.”

Here's to breaking down the silos that Joe and Miko describe, and getting all teams to open up about the value they expect to receive, as well as the value they acheive.

I enjoyed browsing the Software AG blog posts. Their efforts are just starting but the quality and depth of posts is high.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education is Essential – SOA Master Class

iTKO is honored to join industry leaders webMethods/Software AG, ZapThink, and ebizQ to present a tremendous community resource for SOA knowledge, the SOA Master Class Online (www.soamasterclass.com).

Some of SOA’s best thinking can be found on this education and community forum site.  You’ll find great video-based tutorials on SOA concepts, architectures, governance, business issues, and complements of yours truly, SOA quality.

If you’ve spent the last several months trying in vain to put together a complete understanding of my thoughts on SOA Quality and the SOA Testing as a critical aspect of SOA Governance, you will be pleased to see what’s in the SOA Master Class.

This is a completely free resource.  Our goal is simple enough.  We are committed to SOA’s success in the market.  We know that as the talent level of SOA architects, developers and testers matures, the SOA market matures. Those who are enabling that success with great content, analysis, and technology will benefit as well.  This is one of those true win-win scenarios.

Please check out the site to read, watch, learn and participate in the dialogue on all things SOA.