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

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.

 

Service Virtualization market covered in SearchSOA

Great far-reaching Service Virtualization market overview this week in TechTarget (SearchSOA) by George Lawton - "Service Virtualization arises to meet services testing obstacles"

Read here: http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/2240150279/Service-virtualization-arises-to-meet-services-testing-obstacles

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 and HSBC 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.

 

 

 

On CA Communities: Accept Imitations, Not Limitations

I recently caught up with the "Consumer-Driven IT" CA Communities team about contributing an introduction to the concept and practice of Service Virtualization (SV) for their blog. You can read the results here:

Consumer Driven IT: Accept Imitations, but Not Limitations

The message of SV resonates really well with today's most pressing Consumer-Driven IT challenges. Companies are being driven to release new applications to market faster than ever, through new channels that reach customers where they are: whether that means mobile devices, Cloud-based apps, within new social communities and trading networks.

But underneath all these new delivery methods, none of the existing infrastructure and complexity ever goes away -- in fact we have more change and chaos than ever, keeping track of partner applications as well as our critical mainframes and transaction services.

The only safe way to successfully reach market in such an environment is by using virtual environments throughout development and testing of each new piece of IT or software functionality. Using Service Virtualization, all the teams in these distributed environments get very stable labs that allow them to cover all needed customer scenarios, even if they are unavailable, unready, or undergoing change.

Hope you like the article and check out the many useful updates in CA Communities. Link: http://community.ca.com/blogs/perspectives/archive/2012/05/01/consumer-driven-it-accept-imitations-but-not-limitations.aspx

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.

Mainframe Service Virtualization - It's a Big Deal

We don't spend enough time talking about mainframes on this blog, other than as "those back-end constraints" in a composite app. But over the last year, especially working with CA customers, we have gained a tremendous appreciation for all the dev work that happens within the mainframe world - as it offers a great new arena for capturing value and increasing agility. I just made a new video about it here:

 

For most enterprises, business rides on the mainframe. In these groups you have all the same constraints we see in composite applications and the service-oriented world: different teams, maintaining business logic for interconnected components, across different CICS regions, data sources like DB2, ADABAS, IMS services, and so on. Mainframe dev teams often find themselves constrained for access, waiting for critical data scenarios to be set up in other mainframe regions, and in conflict over resources.

IT Operations teams don’t want to rock the boat for real customers by allowing developers and testers to play “under the hood,” yet new test region environments can be extremely difficult and expensive to produce. Service Virtualization should be practiced in a similar fashion within the mainframe, capturing and modeling dependencies between components. For instance, simulating the other half of CICS-CICS transactions, or gathering scenarios from an IMS region as it makes calls to the data layer so we don't need to impact the real thing.

In short, don’t leave efficiencies on the table in Mainframe. We must ensure that we liberate Mainframe development of constraints with Service Virtualization in addition to the upstream application layers.

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.

Video: Parallel Development - The Ultimate Use Case for Service Virtualization

ITKO introduced the concept of Service Virtualization into LISA in 2007.  At the time, the IT analysts didn't get it, and when we introduced the technology to customers in the field, our prospects said things like "that's not possible" or "that would be magic." Well, those very folks have been using our technology in all kinds of impossible and magical ways ever since.

We love seeing how customers can leverage this ability to model and simulate their application and service behaviors in a wide variety of ways.  

Just one of the many novel ways customers employ SV is for virtual Training environments. Think about it.  You need to train thousands of field agents on the new versions of your Point-of-Sale system... How can you stand up systems for training them all without massive infrastructure challenges?  Well, now they run a "better than real" app on the trainee's laptop in our Virtual Service Environment and costs next to nothing to stand up that whole environment.

Yet for all the wonderful ways that virtual services can do the impossible and seem like magic, I believe that leveraging the full capability of our CA-LISA platform for Parallel Development might be the greatest impact we can deliver to a development organization.

 

To help show how LISA's capabilities can solve possibly your greatest challenge as a development organization, I recorded this video that documents a "tale of two Telcos."  One Telco is embarking on the transition of their IT systems to LTE/4G and is now facing this parallel development challenge. The other Telco is a little farther down the path, and has leveraged LISA to make parallel development radically faster and more effective.

If you only watch one video on how to leverage Virtual Services and/or CA-LISA itself to reshape your development lifecycles, I hope you will watch this one.

Thanks for watching.

Video: Stubs & Mocks vs. Virtual Services

Reading this blog you know that we are convinced — and have plenty of evidence to prove that conviction — that Virtual Services have a transformational effect on your dev and testing capabilities. The whole concept of virtual services is to provide productized technology for the general science discipline of modeling and simulation.

Well many of you already build and maintain a form of that now: stubbing, mocking, a responder framework, echo server, dev harnesses… you call them all kinds of things.

Well then what's the difference?  How is the capacity CA LISA provides for virtual services any different than what your development team might already be doing with stubs or mocks?

 

 

The video here points right at the heart of that question.  For those who like to read the book and avoid the movie, stubs vs. virtual services is essentially simplistic behavior models versus intelligent ones.  Simplistic models can give you a false sense of productivity early in a dev cycle, but they set you up for significant integration issues, late defect discovery and troublesome scalability blind spots. Only early development sees some infrastructure issues answered by the use of stubs - but not the rest of your integration and test cycles.  Conversely, virtual services can carry you from design all the way thru delivery and help you solve those issues.

So I hope you watch the video for a more elaborate explanation and let me know what you think.

Australia vs. the World: Service Virtualization Critical in Good and Bad Economic Times

Why is Service Virtualization (SV) so huge down under in ANZ, as well as here in North America? I recently returned from another tour of Australia and was met by a writer for their IT Wire publication about the high level of adoption of LISA's Service Virtualization software by most of the leading financial and telco IT shops in the region:

IT Wire Article: ITKO LISA simplifies testing of composite systems through simulation

Australia is the alternate proof point for much of the rest of the world, demonstrating how Service Virtualization is mandatory in both good times and bad.

When times are GOOD, businesses demand faster time-to-market and more aggressive software delivery schedules to capitalize on ideal conditions. While the rest of the world was feeling an economic pinch in 2008, Australia had strong resources and a growing economy - therefore they needed unconstrained development, to seize on business opportunities in Asia and the rest of the world.

A small company gets better and bigger by being aggressive with its IT investments in good times. That's why you began to see virtually every bank in Australia as well as other IT-enabled companies radically accelerating their development shops by adopting virtual service environments and even private DevTest Clouds over the last 3 years.

But what about bad economic times? We are more familiar with that story for the last 3 years in North America and Europe. Overall budget slashes and IT cost-cutting measures are happening across the economy. Yet many companies still invested in Service Virtualization when times were bad. Why?

Increasing IT efficiency in bad times with SV allows companies to keep their existing employees making gains in productivity, simulate and adjust to the impact of meeting new regulations, reduce costly defects, retain customers, and operate their systems with less infrastructure and cost.

Companies don’t generally grow relative to each other in good times, they do in BAD times. You need to invest in operational efficiencies such as Service Virtualization not just in good times, but throughout hard times. The companies that can deliver on their promises while maintaining high quality will retain customers, and further, those that can innovate through hard times will gain customers and come out ahead when good times return.

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

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!

New Paper: What Should a Service Virtualization Solution Do?

More than four years ago, we released the first version of LISA's Service Virtualization capabilities because we saw a fundamental roadblock occurring at almost every one of our enterprise customers. Sure, they were more efficiently automating functional, regression and performance testing with LISA, but inevitably, teams would complain that they still weren't becoming as "Agile" as they hoped. They were losing productivity due to constraints brought on by other parties they were connected to: partners and other dev teams that either didn't complete their delivery yet, or limited access to their systems.

This is why I'm excited to introduce this new paper I wrote for our 4-part joint IT Thought Leaders Whitepaper Series with our partners at Infosys:

Key Capabilities of a Service Virtualization Solution (Download PDF)
Eliminating Software Development and Testing Constraints by Virtualizing Away Dependencies in the Environment

We have to face the fact that no development team can build and test software in isolation anymore, using repurposed client-server tools. Software lifecycles are becoming increasingly composite and service-based, while an increasing number of smaller, agile teams created interdependencies that must be addressed with a new kind of virtualization - something we called Service Virtualization: the simulation of constrained or unavailable systems for continuous availability throughout the software development and testing lifecycle.

Service Virtualization is now maturing into a widely adopted technology, with many technology vendors embedded, and a market to support it. There are key capabilities any advanced enterprise dev and test team will need to have in a "live-like" virtual service environment that is as close to the real thing as it needs to be, without the constraints of excess coding, maintenance and reliance on big-iron systems to deliver new competitive functionality.

This paper is a good read if you are wondering where Service Virtualization technology has advanced over the last few years. It's not just about replacing the "stubs and mocks" developers used to hand-code with more pat request/responses. Today's apps have become far too interdependent, and fast-changing for that to be sufficient. Testers and developers must be able to recreate complex, composite workflows in an environment that looks and acts just like the real thing.

A smart counterpart at Infosys, Vijay Sairam Pratap, just commented on the story with a very compelling, clear anecdote about the level of realism needed from Service Virtualization to enable robust service assurance in his latest blog from an HP conference. We'll talk about that example, and a couple other newer real-world stories in our next post.

Link to Service Virtualization Capabilities whitepaper download page: http://www.itko.com/resources/service_virtualization_solution.jsp

 

News Today: CA Technologies to Acquire Privately Held ITKO for $330 Million in Cash

Things are heating up here in Plano, TX. And I'm not talking about another 100-degree summer day: ITKO has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by CA Technologies.

Read the full press release here: "CA Technologies to Acquire Privately Held ITKO for $330 Million in Cash"

This is great news for our customers, partners and employees. At ITKO we have long believed maintaining a vendor-neutral approach is a requirement of any large-scale, heterogeneous enterprise IT environment, and CA Technologies shares our vision of supporting “any application, any technology.”

After hundreds of customer engagements over the last 5 years, we've learned our LISA suite, and our capabilities for Service Virtualization are most effective when used to eliminate the most difficult and costly constraints, and solve the world's most complex development, testing and integration challenges. With CA, we are now part of an organization with the reach and capabilities to truly solve the biggest problems enterprise IT faces.

Conveniently, we have seen many of our large enterprise customers also running CA's Application Performance Management (APM) solutions such as Wily Introscope and Net QoS to assure higher service and performance levels amid changing conditions. These joint customers are tackling large scale modernization and migration projects, and seeking new ways to move their applications to the Cloud with less risk.

You can still call us ITKO, and our team will continue to support customers with the service and strategic approach we're known for. But the overall picture of what customers can do to optimize the entire IT life cycle will get a whole lot bigger.

There are many more synergies and advantages to be realized from today's announcement, so look for future posts here on this blog (itko category: "CA") as well as reading pertinent articles on CA's very useful blog "Service Assurance Daily" over the coming weeks.

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!

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.

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.

 

 

 

Impact2011 Preview Video - LISA for WebSphere, SOA, BPM DevTest

Here's the follow up to last week's post on "iTKO Opens the Throttle for Agile App Dev at IBM IMPACT 2011 - Platinum Sponsor" -- which outlines 4 key sessions to attend at IBM's Impact2011 conference (April 10-15, Las Vegas - register here). In this new Chalk Talk video, John outlines some of the reasons IBM technology customers will learn something at the event:

 

Key approaches John covered in this latest Chalk Talk video - relevant to anyone in enterprise IT but especially tailored for IBM users:

1. Service Virtualization
2. Collaborative Defect Resolution
3. Continuous, End-to-End Testing and Validation

The reality of enterprise applications today is that complexity and rate of change will always increase. So if your company is doing IBM-enabled SOA, BPM, and seeking aspects such as data management and higher performance from applications, it will behoove you to explore ways to increase your agility and open the throttle with some of this new thinking.

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.

Bridging the Cloud Divide with Development & Test Platforms

(With iTKO's guest blogger and Solution Strategist, Ken Ahrens) Your boss wants you to "do Cloud," but you’re not sure ... so what now? At least you are not alone in coming to grips with Cloud. We recently saw this article from one of our favorite columnists Joe McKendrick, covering a CA Technologies-sponsored survey of both IT execs and practitioners. Check it out:

ZDNet Service-Oriented Blog: "Cloud divide: senior executives want cloud, security and IT managers are nervous"

There are a number of interesting data points about Cloud adoption in the article that made us think:

1. 44% of executives name security teams as primary opponents of public cloud (27% private)

First of all, your leading public cloud provider should have more resources exclusively dedicated to "perimiter security" than your team can muster, and they should be able to address many of the typical concerns of external access like firewalls, authentication, etc. So the real question is: how securely designed are your applications themselves?

This is a great reason to start by moving Dev and Test activities to the cloud.  In most mature enterprises the non-production systems shouldn't be using real customer data anyway.  What better way to ensure the protection of the data? How about by first moving the desensitized or "clean" data into virtual data models that meet the needs of dev & test teams; and then running lots of analysis to make sure none of the "safe" information gets out during the process, or in deployment through use of the software.  This would be a prudent 2-step approach to the problem. We outline aspects of this in our latest paper on "Service Virtualization and the DevTest Cloud."

2. 52% of IT managers fear job losses

Although we don’t normally comment on this kind of thing, it’s interesting to think that this would be a viable concern.  The point is that employees should move up the value chain, and concentrate on providing more vital services to their employer, and therefore its ability to deliver for customers.  Managers should be focusing on how much more agile they can make their teams in rolling out new features and functionality to the market, and Cloud approaches should be malleable to these efforts.

3. 80% of all enterprises (and 92% of large enterprises) have at least one cloud service

Shouldn’t this stat vindicate the security and control concerns?  If we’re already doing Cloud, we can point to a project to determine if control has been lost or data compromised.  These case studies should be reviewed seriously to determine the correct course of action for the next round of services. We just talked about this "Cloud Creep" in a previous blog -- so if it’s already happening, you’d be much better served to figure out how to get on board.

4. Mature adopters of cloud are already virtualizing.

Not a big surprise here that once you have grips around server virtualization, moving to the cloud should be much more straightforward.  The two naturally fit together. But all this cloud infrastructure puts even more of a strain on key "over utilized" systems that cannot be virtualized, especially in a Cloud environment. For more on this, see our paper on "The Next Frontier for Virtualization: Over-Utilized Systems." 

What about all of those mainframes, ERP systems, third party service providers, and large databases?  How will they cope with additional systems looking for access? That's where Service Virtualization is an applicable practice -- productizing the practice of simulating those over-utilized systems is also a way to bring "off cloud" and out-of scope systems into scope.

What are your Cloud concerns? We only covered a few of the points in the article, so let us know and we'll talk about them here. Thanks to Joe for the overview and CA for making these empirical survey results available.

Virtualization or Cloud? Both or Neither? Why or Why Not?

Recently commented on eBizQ's Forums about a question that on first read seemed rather silly: Is it better to use Virtualization for some business apps rather than the Cloud? Here's what I said about it:

"It's hard to picture how it is better to use one than then other, when both could be perfectly applicable. I would expect virtualization to be a commonly accepted precursor to leveraging cloud-based environments for applications."

The discussion here, especially in posts by Ian and Lori, does a great job of making sure we aren't lulled into thinking of Virtualization and Cloud as either/or propositions. You are talking about two totally different things. But let's play devil's advocate and discuss how they are not very different.

1. Near-Ubiquity. Virtualization, as in hardware/desktop VMs and system images, is now par for the course. And we expect Cloud Computing as defined here to also become a major part of every enterprise IT strategy - in fact, we think it truly arrived this year. Therefore, both are present in most major IT shops already.

2. Complimentary Value Proposition. Obviously, you have compelling reasons to do both - I like Satoru's quip on "selfishly" utilizing several different Virtual images on an Amazon EC2 Cloud environment - perfect for quickly launching or freezing several different versions of his software lab depending on their reliability or versioning needs. To an extent, you can use both for similar value reasons: cost efficiency, more optimal use of computing resources (and/or capacity), system flexibility or elasticity... again, different things but similar value props.

3. Constrained by External Factors. Lastly we have discovered that Virtualization and Cloud are most similar in what they CAN'T optimize conventionally. Almost the same behavioral rules apply here - if it's a system or server you have access to and control over, it is easy to image as a VM, and also logical and cost-effective to deploy it in a Cloud. If you are dealing with an Over-Utilized (high traffic and size) system, or one that is Out-of-Scope (external to your dept. or a major service outside your company's authority), BOTH hardware virtualization and Cloud quickly become ineffective or constrained. Here's what I commented on that:

"There will still be some over-utilized business app resources that are also resistant to both - it doesn't make sense to try to replicate a 2TB mainframe as a VM, or stick it in a public cloud..."

A solution to the above constraints for both, is a technology we call Service Virtualization - this is now a very mature solution space and something we've been discussing for more than 3 years  here, since we introduced LISA Virtualize product features. Virtual Services provide a companion to VMs, and simulate the behavior and performance of those Out-of-Scope items, so when and if you do deploy both in a Cloud, you truly get an elastic, constraintless environment for software development and testing purposes.

Cool Field Story 3: Self-Service Virtualization

Here's another great story Ken and I gathered after a recent successful deployment. Technology is always rushing forward with more customizable development and test lab solutions for every enterprise.  Even at iTKO we continue to extend leading-edge product functionality for all the unique scenarios that customers bring forward.

Much of the time this type of customization is focused on making automated testing or performance testing more efficient.  But in reality, there are still tens of thousands of manual testers out there, and save for some slight process improvement, they have been largely ignored over the years when it comes to automating their complete environment.

An iTKO telco customer recently showed some examples of how they enabled their manual testers to be much more efficient through the use of Service Virtualization.  After sending transactions through their Front-End CRM UI, they log into their Back-End UI which shows them the detail of the Virtual Services captured behind their System Under Test.  This Back-End UI is something they developed on top of LISA Virtualize, and it exposes the current data inside LISA, such as the status of various Customer Orders, previously executed transactions, etc.

That’s mildly interesting, so testers can at least see if the transactions are properly reaching the Back-End.  However, what’s really clever is that they let the manual testers go in and modify the Back-End Virtual Service directly.  Testers can automatically skip a number of steps to put an order into the completion phase (which would typically take a very long time to enter in the Front-End UI), or they can setup negative scenarios such as an invalid order, error condition, etc.

This lets users decide in real-time exactly how they want the system to behave.  They are able to test a larger number of scenarios simply by being able to create conditions that the test lab normally does not allow.  And manual testers are empowered to setup their own scenarios without involving the DBAs and higher-level Test Data Management architects.  So by being able to quickly “prepare” the virtual environment for a specific test, they do not have to spend so much time setting and resetting test data.

Fortunately for them this has come with a number of positive results as well:

• Functional coverage after the first project stands at 80%, and they plan to reach 90% by the next release.
• Testers are 40-50% more efficient without needing access to specific test data, or getting a DBA to setup a specific scenario
• Testing across the board has started earlier in the software lifecycle, and they are finding defects much earlier in the SDLC
• Oh, and on top of all that they’re already saving over $200K annually, simply by not sending transactions to validate their system against the third-party vendor's test lab system (which was seldom working reliably and had unstable data anyway).

We hope you find these real-world stories useful in thinking about how to improve your own dev and test processes. Let us know what you think, and if there are any software challenges you would like us to cover in future articles!

Cool Field Story 2: From Production Issue to Resolution Virtually Overnight

Here's another great story from the field from iTKO lead solution strategist Ken Ahrens. (You may remember the paper he wrote with me on "Virtualizing Over-Utilized Systems" a few months ago).

When all else (literally) fails... try simulating from Production

One of our banking customers recently told us a success story about how they used Virtualize to solve an issue related to a production outage.  We were pretty surprised because LISA is primarily used for dev and test in the SDLC, and not typically in Operations and Production.  But they said for certain that their production defect was solved because they were able to use Virtualize to recreate the problem scenario.

However, Virtual Services was not their first approach.  When the Operations people identified that customers were experiencing a performance-related issue, they immediately contacted the Production Support team.  After collecting information about the issue they triaged to find that customer problems were due to a performance related issue happening in the middleware. 

Next, they immediately tried to recreate the problem by generating load in their test lab, but they found that they could not reproduce it there.  The test lab's version of the mainframe could not support the transaction load, so the back-end capacity was never high enough to recreate the problem in the middleware.  At this point, several developers and testers had spent more than a week trying to reproduce the issue, and they still didn’t know exactly what was causing the problem.

They reached out to the bank's performance team (who are avid LISA virtualization experts) to ask for assistance in running the stress tests.  The load team mentioned that for very high volume load tests, they used Virtual Services to simulate the back-ends, which had significantly higher capacity than the legacy mainframe system in the lab.  That way, there was no bottleneck behind the middleware under test.

The only problem was that the data was already set up in the live systems, and the Virtual Services used different data.  Typically this is the kind of problem that can take days to fix with DBAs manually copying records from one system to another and using conventional TDM (test data management) methods to ready all of the data for a test.  Indeed in this case, this effort had already taken place once. So instead of copying all that data to a new system, one of the Performance team engineers looked at their sample responses from Production and used LISA to automatically generate a thousand responses in a handful of Virtual Services in a couple of hours.

Immediately, they were able to generate the proper load on the middleware system, using the Virtual Service backend to eliminate the bottleneck.  They found they were quickly able to recreate the problem and identify the proper fix.  The typical resolution for this type of problem went from being measured in weeks to simply days (over a weekend, actually) through the use of Virtual Services.

The moral? When all else (literally) fails, support problem isolation and resolution with Virtual Services instead of trying to replicate what you don't need. It's predictable, scalable -- and just works!

 

 

Speaking of Cloud: Webinar 11/10 and Cloud Expo 2010 Sessions

This is not just a big week for political pundits - it's a huge one for technology pundits, and the topic of hype and speculation is, of course, Cloud.

We're heading out to the Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara today, where we are hoping to hear less hype, and more about companies getting down to practical value with Cloud. I'll be back to my roots meeting people on the show floor, and iTKO's Chief Geek/Founder John Michelsen will be making three appearances at the convention on Tuesday, Nov 2.

  John's appearances at Sys-Con Cloud Expo 2010:

1. Breakout Session: Tues 11/2 - 9:55-10:40 AM: "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Cloud Applications"
   What is preventing enterprises from realizing the elasticity and cost savings expected from Cloud applications? Successfully delivering complex apps in distributed Cloud environments requires a means for dealing with the constraints of systems and services that are unavailable to development and testing teams. The DevTest Cloud is an essential platform that provides the ability to provision development and test labs, consisting of Virtual Machines (VMs), Virtual Service Environments, and automated regression and performance test servers in the Cloud.
2. Demo Session: Tues 11/2 - 5:00 - 5:20 PM: A product demonstration of LISA DevTest Cloud Manager (DCM) for provisioning elastic, on-demand virtual testing and development environments.
3. CTO Power Panel: Tues 11/2 - 7:15-7:45 PM: John joins other Cloud development leaders in this CTO-only panel in the general session room.

All of this activity leads up to a DevTest Cloud webinar we are putting on next week:

iTKO Webinar: What Makes a DevTest Cloud Fly? (And what is the value?)
November 10, 2010 1:00pm - 2:00pm Central

So your company is moving its software development and integration activities to the DevTest Cloud. What are some of the new practices you should expect to be able to do in this environment, and what are other companies doing successfully right now? The DevTest Cloud is an essential platform that provides the ability to provision enterprise development and test labs, consisting of Virtual Machines (VMs), Virtual Service Environments, and automated regression and performance test servers in the Cloud. Examples of utilizing DevTest Cloud for performance tuning, regression testing and continuous integration will be covered in this insightful session.

A DevTest Cloud provides an essential platform for enterprise software development and testing. Whether the Cloud infrastructure consists of pooled on-premise computing resources, or public Cloud capacity that is provisioned as needed, the end result is the truly on-demand, elastic capacity we expected from the Cloud, at a fraction of the cost of dealing with the hard constraints of traditional dev and test environments.

Registration is open to iTKO LISA customers and subscribers. Sign up here and we’ll send you the meeting information: http://www.itko.com/resources/webinar_devtestcloud_nov2010.jsp

Stay tuned for more updates from iTKO at the Cloud Expo.

Case Study - Test, Integrate and Virtualize Environments at Oracle

When the world's largest enterprise software company makes a commitment to "shift quality left" - and make consistent improvements in time-to-market, labor and infrastructure costs, and delivered quality across product lines, that equates to a case study worth reading.

• Read the iTKO LISA Case Study: Oracle Testing & Validation here.

This year we've been working with Oracle to automate and remove constraints from aspects of their own software lifecycle, and I recently had a chance to interview two of the leads on our projects there.

First, Oracle AIA (Application Integration Architecture) group's Nand Shivkumar described how they were able to Virtualize the company's integration labs, and offer their business-specific process integrations as Virtual Services for other performance and test teams to use for their own parallel development without delays or conflicts over access.

We also talked with the Oracle Fusion ADF (Application Development Framework) quality lead Amitabh Nandan about how they are conducting complex testing, then automating those as test suites that validate their advanced Web 2.0 style interfaces and frameworks for building customer apps.

For a software company that has grown with extensive product development as well as through strategic acquisition of leading product suites, the ability to rapidly integrate and deploy apps depends on having ready lab environments, as well as highly automated testing that can peel the layers of their architecture from the rich UI to the middle tier. Hope you enjoy the story and your feedback is appreciated.

News from IBM on Development & Testing in the Cloud

Good news came out today from our partners at IBM that highlights many of the initial customer successes we're seeing for the discipline of moving software development and test processes to the Cloud - what we at iTKO refer to as DevTest Cloud.

The solution offering, called IBM's Smart Business Development and Test Cloud, encompasses several technologies and services from IBM and its partners. iTKO's LISA Virtualize technology is a critical catalyst of the solution, as LISA's Virtual Service Environments (VSEs) enable the virtualization of constrained systems and performance labs needed to make the Cloud a truly elastic, 24/7 ready resource for parallel dev & test.

You may remember two major announcements this year we've discussed on this blog - iTKO's role in IBM's Application Virtualization strategy, and our integration of LISA as a Ready for Rational solution enabling end-to-end testing and virtualization.

Key features listed in today's release "IBM Expand Cloud Offerings for Software Development & Testing" included:

• IBM Testing Services for Cloud - application virtualization: Clients rapidly create multiple virtual test environments customized for each development and testing team.  By providing testing teams with 24/7 availability without dependencies on back-end systems and data stores, the service gives testing teams the ability to test more thoroughly throughout the life cycle without worrying about data or service availability. A North American company using this service experienced a 22 percent reduction in the Function and System Test cycle and a 100 percent return in ROI within 90 days.
• IBM Testing Services for Cloud – performance testing: Brings together automation and performance testing tools to significantly reduce time by as much as 50 percent, the service provides flexible, utility-based testing that delivers on-demand performance testing, and offers robust, large-scale performance testing services to enterprises, via Cloud hosting.  This service identifies defects earlier in the cycle where they are less expensive to fix and eliminates performance-related bottlenecks.

How do customers start capturing the value above, and start utilizing Cloud Development & Test solutions like this today?  We recently wrote this case study with a major Telco customer that was an early adopter of our joint vision of VSEs and Application Virtualization in the Cloud, and they have certainly seen even more returned value over the last 6 months.

News Today: LISA Across the Software Lifecycle at Australia and New Zealand Bank

Today's press release represents a very significant customer announcement in a very important geography for iTKO. Several leading institutions in Australia & New Zealand are selecting LISA for virtualisation (proper English spelling, of course) of their software development and testing environments, as well as end-to-end testing and validation activities.

We are particularly excited to announce this new deployment at ANZ Bank via today's press release:

iTKO LISA Software deployed in Asia Pacific
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group selects iTKO’s LISA Testing, Validation and Virtualisation Solutions

Here's an excerpt from the release: “After an evaluation process that considered our existing technologies and future IT objectives, we ultimately decided that iTKO’s complete LISA Suite would reduce risk, cycle times and costs across our development and testing cycles,” said ANZ Head of Testing, Environments & Change CoE, Technology Global Solution Delivery, Marcello Martino. “We believe that LISA will allow us to automate more activities, improve our use of existing infrastructure, enhance collaboration, and help us to better meet our customer needs.”

This bank is representative of modernization going on in technology groups in the entire APAC region. ANZ is making huge leaps in modernizing their SDLC lab environments, and collaborating with delivery partners, through virtual services, validation and governance technologies. We think this is only the start of advances we'll see coming from down under as adoption of Cloud-based dev & test practices accelerates.

Related coverage on this news:

• Computerworld.au: ANZ picks up in-house testing platform
• ITWire: Westpac and ANZ float cloud testing
• Global Services: ANZ Picks Up In-house testing platform
• Finextra: ANZ and Westpac tap the cloud for testing
• MIS Asia (Ovum perspective): Calling retail banks: boarding on your flight to the cloud has now commenced

The World Finally Seems to Get the DevTest Cloud Idea

We're going to continue this week with more interesting things we've heard customers and partners say about best practices for employing DevTest Cloud practices to solve big, hairy software problems.

Last week we were at STARWEST 2010 in San Diego, and the attendance was about double last year's draw. More than 250 QA professionals stopped by, and many of the managers said "I was specifically asked to find out how to virtualize my test lab" or "We are looking for a way to take our SDLC to the Cloud" or "I know we are moving to a federated Cloud solution for our defense projects and we need to be involved" - referring to the government's Forge.Mil initiative we discussed here recently.

Heady stuff, because in previous years most of the questions at these shows were about testing specific protocols and interfaces such as web services, web 2.0 UIs or TIBCO, etc.

From our bizdev man Scott - he made one call to a potential customer, and he was already thinking DevTest Cloud. Check out an excerpt of what this guy sent out to his team, telling them all to get familiar with the concept -- before he'd even finished the first page of our recent whitepaper about virtualization in the DevTest Cloud:

If you glance at the executive summary of their white paper, they seem to address the issue of the various independent systems required to make up a test/development environment. From my high level discussion, I learned that they do this via simulation rather than reproduction of the external system. Having a solution to simulate external dependencies would be of great benefit for repeatable tests and to quickly reproduce a whole environment. I think it is very interesting.

All of the aspects that make Cloud enticing - elasticity, on-demand resources, provisioning as a "utility," multi-tenancy and low-cost capacity, make DevTest Cloud especially interesting, because it truly allows teams to work in parallel, while avoiding the constraints of huge costs and delays created by waiting for unavailable or live system dependencies to be available in their environments.

We too find it very encouraging that when enterprise IT thinks Cloud, they are starting to also think of software Development and Test as an essential function of the Cloud, rather than merely Cloud Computing as a deployment option.

 

Drafting with ease behind Virtual Service Environments

We often get the question: If we are using a Virtual Service Environment, instead of the live environment, are we still effectively testing the system? 

When some people first hear about replacing constrained systems, mainframes, incomplete and under-development services and the like with Virtual Services, their first reaction is immediately: "That's not a real performance / load / regression test bed then."

I was at a meeting in Europe last week -- and chalk it up to perspective but one of our partner's engineering counterparts used a really effective analogy for how LISA VSE works.

Picture a car. When you want to test a car's aerodynamics, you can't get in it and start driving around and expect any degree of certainty in your results. So you put the car in a wind tunnel, and then do the testing. So when you simulate the wind hitting the car, you are certainly still testing the car, but you have the ability to turn the wind up and down and do the testing with more control.

I really liked the simple message and hope it helps you understand the concept of how a virtual service environment can actually work better and provide a better range of performance results than the expense and effort of always having to replicate or use "the real thing."

The same concept also applies for a stable set of test data to do your regression testing - the external data around your system under test is configurable and controllable, so if there's a problem, it is your app failing, not the test scenario becoming invalid due to unexpected changes in the data.

2nd Paper in Infosys & iTKO Series: Service Virtualization for Modern Applications

I just got back from a select QA Leadership workshop in Palo Alto hosted by our partners at Infosys, where I presented perhaps one of the world's shortest talks for one of the world's most complicated tasks: Optimizing the entire application lifecycle in 30 minutes or less!

Obviously I could only scratch the surface, but there's something to be said for the focus that comes out of brevity, and it led to great questions and discussion with joint customers and Infosys leaders like Aparna Sharma (whom I've presented webinars with before) - people who have overcome some of the biggest challenges in software testing.

Certainly a major focus of my talk and an ensuing discussion was the practice of Service Virtualization - the simulation of systems and services that are either constrained or unavailable for use in testing and development throughout the software lifecycle. Service Virtualization is key to eliminating dependencies and allowing multiple teams to work around their constraints and conduct their activities in parallel.

It was a great day -- and on that topic of virtualization, we also have the release of the final version of this brief paper we co-authored with Infosys for the second of a series of articles about best practices for IT, Dev and QA initiatives for modern, service-based applications.

You can download the new paper for free here: Whitepaper with Infosys and iTKO: Service Virtualization for Modern Applications

Here's the abstract: Disruptive innovations such as the internet have repeatedly forced businesses to change quickly or be relegated to history. Every such disruption asks a simple question of service functions in an organization - can they evolve quickly enough? Modern approaches such as service oriented architectures (SOA), along with other similar distributed application architectures, carry great promise and can provide an effective model for lean, agile and componentized IT that can adapt quickly. SOA is one of the most widely adopted enterprise architectural methodologies, but its implementation is anything but simple. Since classical testing methodologies and tools do not fit modern applications well, we have evolved newer more rigorous approaches and products to address increased software complexity and change. Service Virtualization is one of the latest ideas that can provide a faster time to market for software, with higher quality and lesser risk.

This new whitepaper, jointly written by Infosys' Gaurish Hattangadi and iTKO's Rajeev Gupta, focuses on the use of virtualization of constraints as it applies to the problems of developing and testing modern SOA applications. Let us know what you think as you explore virtualizing services in your own software lifecycle. http://www.itko.com/resources/servicevirtualizationmodernapps.jsp.

2010 - The year we met DevTest Clouds...

Today we released a new version of the whitepaper: "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Application Development" -- and aside from looking really good (kudos to the designers), it contains a whole lot of new thinking about how we should best bring enterprise software development into the Cloud age.

If your enterprise has a Cloud initiative brewing, there is not a higher value lever to pull right now than optimizing development and testing activities in the Cloud. You should find out what DevTest Cloud platforms can do to bring the elasticity of Cloud to the software lifecycle: on-demand dev & test environments, with ready capacity at exponentially lower costs.

This is just a start, as we believe 2010 will be the year of the emergence of DevTest Cloud platforms. Leading vendors such as IBM, VMware, Citrix, Amazon and others are delivering elastic, on-demand infrastructures that are more than just places to host applications. We'll continue demonstrating how enterprises will be able to build their own DevTest Cloud platform that leverages these solutions.

Look for more blogs from us on this vital practice, as well as new videos, new press and articles, customer stories, and an appearance from John at the upcoming Cloud Computing Expo 2010.

You can get a copy of this paper, and find all the latest DevTest Cloud resources from iTKO here: http://itko.com/cloud.

Bringing Virtual Efficiency to Utilities - On IBM developerWorks Cloud Zone

The Utility and Energy industry is one space where "Green IT" is really creating "Green" end results in terms of customer usage and efficiencies. We have had utility customers for years solving software integration problems at the service- and message bus level, better validating and testing customer provisioning and billing apps. So that makes for some traditional software efficiencies.

 But what are some of today's more unique challenges where we can apply the entire concept of Service Virtualization - to remove resource costs and constraints - and make the software development lifecycle "Greener" by creating efficiencies at the very source of our power?

Article in IBM developerWorks Cloud Zone:
Service virtualization and validation practices for the utility industry 
Eliminating software constraints and mitigating IT risk to modernize energy delivery

I recently worked with LISA product manager/EMEA solutions director Chris Kraus on this interesting article - out today, that covers this for IBM's DeveloperWorks community of more than 4 million IT professionals. Thanks Aimee and the team at DW for the editorial help - we hope it offers some useful advice on how Service Virtualization, when applied to Utility IT problems, takes on a very real quality.

For one thing, think about Advanced Metering Systems (AMS), and the enabling software that sits atop a new Smart Grid architecture. We are literally seeing millions of new devices being added to the grid, every month. Across the global energy industry, there is a push to optimize energy infrastructure both at a network and customer level. Governments have mandated efficiency initiatives that are funded both by customer billing and subsidy ($3.4 Billion in government grant funds for Smart Grid projects in US, $21.4 Billion allocated worldwide in 2009).

Another cool area? Take a look at what's going on in Europe right now - but instead of smart meters, it's smart cars. Electric fuel points for electric cars have a similar value prop to smart metering - and pilots are going on in Germany, Netherlands and France. To get there, they not only need to set up the plug-in fuel stations, they need to anticipate the demands of a moving and growing customer base for electric fuel, and the metering and billing complexities that go with it.

News Today: Enabling the Defense Community in the Cloud with LISA Virtual Dev & Testing

Today iTKO issues a press release about our support for Forge.Mil, a collaborative software environment for the U.S. Department of Defense. As many of you know we have been following the dedicated work of DISA (DoD’s IT arm), and LISA-enabling their leading partners (such as Harris, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, and many others) over the last 5 years, as a part of certifying and test services that are contributing to deliver functionality to the warfighter.

Here's the official press release out today:

Optimized Software Virtualization, Test and Validation in the Cloud for U.S. Department of Defense

DISA's Forge.Mil Initiative to Offer Shared TestForge Services in the Cloud, Enabling Faster Delivery of Capabilities to the Warfighter Through Software Release Efficiencies

Most discussion of Cloud to date is focused on either the infrastructure itself (the actual servers and running VMs, or IaaS - Infrastructure as as Service), or the applications themselves that are hosted on Cloud (for instance a SaaS-based offering). But how do we successfully deliver today's complex applications, when all the dependencies and constraints of unavailable systems drag teams down? Nowhere would this challenge be more evident than in Defense, where the work of many distributed teams must go on, while at the same time critical live systems must be secured against the volatility of testing and development.

Forge.Mil contains a Cloud-based community called TestForge - with a built-in Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Virtual Service Environments, so all development and test contributors can have 24/7 availability without impacting live systems, and create new levels of efficiency. The Forge.Mil initiative (which includes TestForge, SourceForge as well as providing a cloud platform for other aspects of software lifecycle management) proves that in many aspects of IT governance and innovation, federal agencies continue to lead the way over the private sector. Optimizing software in this sense can not only save time and money, but lives in the field. Thanks to everyone who has helped drive this vision.

Mind the Development Gap in Virtualization and Cloud Approaches

We recently had the chance to catch up with Eric Knipp, who happened to be in the area (yes, we have astute local Gartner analysts in Dallas, and no cowboy hats on in the room). He made an interesting point: that the way we describe Service Virtualization was really oriented toward the "Design Time" aspect of a development environment.

That is definitely a "development gap" that needs to be minded. When I read and hear articles about new development processes, it seems like there is a wide gap between the developer's code itself (addressed by Agile, scrum, source control, some ALM) that extends all the way through integration and testing, and continues until Deployment (where the software assets exist in Runtime).

As an industry, we look at Virtualization and Cloud as deployment frontiers. That's cool, but it represents a small portion of what could be done with the two technologies working together to eliminate that development gap, before we step off into it.  

We are increasingly finding that as development becomes more distributed across small teams and separate domains, the number of pre-production development servers and test beds balloons. Whether that deployed app is on a regular web server, or a Cloud-hosted VM, it still seems like we are leaving a bigger proliferation there. It might not seem that big at first, but few real enterprises haven't already started leveraging these distributed computing resources now.

If Cloud Computing and Virtualization are all about replicating or replacing production servers, then why would a top banking customer replicate more than 1100 services and systems with Virtual Services instead of letting them keep making copies of Virtual Machines (VMs) on their network, and later, in their private cloud solution?

Short of longing for the old days of monolithic, centrally controlled systems with 1 production environment and a couple test and staging environments... business won't let IT go back to slow releases - our agility is also creating a new burden in pre-production. Of course, this applies for larger enterprises - there are many instance of new companies who are building functionality "for the Cloud" that is limited in scope and integration requirements, starts fresh, and thus, does not have as much of a burden here.

So here's my question again: If you had to count up the instances of pre-production vs. production "environments" and servers, would the pre-prod outnumber the production by 10-1? 100-1? Be honest and think about all those dev and test servers you don't know enough about to shut down... and think about all the partners that must have their own as well.

And, mind the gap before you step off that platform!

Those Guys need LISA!

I frequently joke with my team about finding our next customers in major business publications. Every time I read a headline like the following, I immediately think: “Those guys need LISA!"

Yahoo Tech News: "Apple, AT&T sites buckle as iPhone 4 pre-orders begin"

The fact is, all the agile developers, functional testers and load testing servers they can fire up are not going to help them here.  This is NOT a load testing issue, it’s a virtualization of services issue!

If we met the guys working on all this critical stuff, you would certainly not hear that companies like Apple or AT&T don’t have enough money to buy servers.  In fact, many major companies actually tell me that they have more servers registered in their asset tracking system than they have employees!  These guys will be no different...

So how could these teams have used LISA to prevent this conundrum?

1. Service Virtualize each others' pieces of functionality that contribute to the site experience, so that each team can develop and functionally test their bits, without having to wait for the system to come together later, during integration.
2. Service Virtualize the dependent systems (inventory, customer ordering, account and number provisioning, etc.) so that performance tests at high levels can be performed ahead of time, and each service can size and qualify their environment for the load expected when it goes live.

Some day in the future, they will even want to have intelligent ways to fail over in production during peak load hours, but let's not put the cart before the horse. One of my banking customers puts it eloquently when he tells his component teams to reach a certain performance level on their own: "If your app isn't performing fast enough in your own virtual environment, why should you bother giving it to me to test in my environment?"

OK I’ll stop rambling.  Now somebody let me know when the coast is clear, so I can order my next phone ...  ;)