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.

ITKO retrospective with John & Shridhar in D Magazine

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

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

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

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

Forum: What was the biggest development for Cloud in 2011?

Participating again in the eBizQ forum on Cloud - and starting the process of looking back on a very eventful year for ITKO (and CA Technologies) in 2011, and picking our horses for what will happen in 2012.

The most obvious thing we saw in Cloud was a continued increase in consumerization and public level awareness, thanks to the usual suspects of Amazon, Apple, Google & Microsoft. You would be hard pressed to complete a download of consumer media or software these days without an invitation to claim your own Cloud spot for storing information or streaming your playlists.

But what about big business? How effectively did major companies in other industries embrace the Cloud? I just wrote a little piece on this here: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/12/what-was-the-biggest-development-in-the-cloud-for-2011.php

The biggest development for the cloud this year was, well... development IN the cloud. The categorization of Cloud as "another place to host your apps" provided some incremental efficiencies, yes, but that's a pretty commoditized activity. We always knew the cloud could do more!

Setting up elastic, on-demand dev and test environments in cloud actually turns out to be the best first use case of cloud in the enterprise. As developers need to create new functionality and verify its performance and quality on top of layers of existing stuff, they all inevitably demand their own environments.

We've seen many enterprises that have dev and test environments outnumbering production environments by 7-to-1 or more - and with inconsistent accuracy, as there is a great deal of manual setup and maintenance involved in each of those instances. Let's harness all that excess computing power and pool it inside the company as Private clouds -- and for higher capacity or seasonal needs, instantly provision ready environments in Public clouds. [more >]

Hopefully that makes sense to our readers who live in the application development and testing world -- you are in the vanguard of Cloud simply because these activities are the most natural first step, and there are immediate infrastructure efficiencies to be gained right off the bat.

As for the rest of our predictions and a look back, stay tuned...

Mock & Roll will Never Die

If you already have built a "mock system" in order to advance development, why would you need something better? I recently had a good conversation with our East architecture lead Ken Ahrens (see more of his work here) after a great CA World event for ITKO was winding down in Las Vegas. We had a lot of questions in our sessions about the development shop that has already "rolled their own" system of stubs and mocks - and what that meant for Service Virtualization practices.

When a company says they already have a mock system, we normally view that as a very positive sign - and tell them as much.  Often we have to convince customers that incomplete and unavailable systems are development problems that need to be solved, before we can even talk about the idea of Service Virtualization capabilities. Whereas the customer with a mock system already understands this is a real problem that needs to be solved.

I usually comment at this point about how we’ve replaced several mock systems at other customers (banks, utilities, telcos, etc...) with LISA's service virtualization. SV really is the productization of the stub and mock space, with enough sophistication to support more complex logic and performance scenarios. Similar to how you wouldn’t write your own database nowadays, it doesn’t make sense to build your own mock system when there is an industry standard solution for this available.

Some questions that usually come up:

• Does your mock system meet 100% of your needs and is it used on every single project?
• How expensive is the mock system to build and maintain?
• How fast do you need new mock services built, and are they ready on time?

If a development shop is mocking a single binary transaction -- that is a simple enough problem to solve with a bit of code. But as soon as multiple systems talk to each other, and multiple business scenarios need to be validated - the manual stub approach quickly starts to trip over its own weight, and the process of mocking and massaging test data and environments can drastically slow down delivery.

On one recent visit to an East coast utility, the customer team decided that LISA began to win (from a cost perspective) after only 10 rather finite services were mocked.  One of our favorite banks established a "center of excellence" for enabling teams with Service Virtualization instead of stubs, and measured a full return in about 6 months - then did something even more interesting by rapidly fixing issues found in production by virtualizing production behavior into the dev environment.  A successful customer like this doesn't just buy software, they take the adoption of the practice seriously - and it's usually the guys who have experienced the pain of rolling their own mocks that see the potential benefits the fastest.

In short – if you already do mock services we think it’s a good thing, so tell us about your story!

 

Emergency Alert Message: Seek a Virtual Environment Immediately!

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

ITKO Insights, with Gartner Research, Issue 2 -
Winter 2011 - Ensuring Agile Composite Application Development


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

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

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

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

 

 

 

LISA Customers at CA World'11 - An Excellent Hour of Real Stories and Results

Most of us ITKOers are just back from our very first CA World -- and it couldn't have been a more exciting time, as we see LISA solutions becoming a key part of of the CA family of solutions and optimizing the application lifecycle for a whole new set of customers. Thanks to everyone who visited our booth and attended our fun outdoor reception Monday night.

The pinnacle of the conference, for me at least, was the ITKO Customer Session on Tuesday, where some of our leading customers at HSBC, IBM Global Services, Sprint and SoCal Edison shared their real-world stories and results of implementing LISA to eliminate constraints from their application lifecycles.

Highlights included:

• An estimated 50% faster time to market for new product/functionality delivery across the board - meeting management's critical requirement for more agile innovation.
• As much as 94-99.6% faster system testing cycles. The customer said "I would have reported 100% improvement because of the level of automation, but nobody would have believed me!"
• For 2000+ development and test resources, increased the availability of environments to consistently identify defects 2 phases earlier (40-70% cycle time reduction), and realized ROI within 30 days.

One of the coolest things we've ever seen came up in the last spot - a fun internal education videos SCE's Hector Sotelo showed here during his talk - "I Need An Environment":

 

After the session there were some great questions for the group -- and, not unexpectedly, a healthy degree of skepticism from the audience that Service Virtualization and automation with LISA could yield huge results like saving $12M in infrastructure costs, 50% faster time to delivery and 99%+ faster regression and integration test cycles.

But this session was not ITKO telling the story - it was a real LISA customer panel that has been there, and done that -- and the consensus was that while the software does a lot - is is still people that must make the change. The challenges of realizing optimization in the software lifecycle aren't technical in most cases. The panel explained how they got the buy-in and adoption of not just one development or test team, but IT ops, management, and the line of business that depends on software for its offerings.  Anyway, this was a very compelling session to hear, so expect some more observations about it and plans for more customer sessions in the future. We'll let you know when more videos and material from CA World 2011 become available.

 

 

Get the voke Market Snapshot on Lifecycle Virtualization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A High-Velocity Customer Event Retrospective

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

 

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

Three trends that really seemed to emerge:

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

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

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

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

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

Forum: What Don't Companies Get about Cloud?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready to Fly at TIBCO TUCON 2011 - Session

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

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

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

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

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

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