The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

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!

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

 

ITKO - Evolution of a Brand

Here's a marketing-related blog instead of our usual IT best practices and business updates, so if that's not interesting to you, come back soon. You may have noticed an updated look for ITKO including a new website and logo over the last month or so, with visual changes prior to and after the news about CA acquiring ITKO.

As we continue to grow, so does our brand awareness. Most people look for ITKO because they've been referred to us by name. So while we still advertise, about 56% of people visiting our site either enter our full URL or search for ITKO and LISA by name.

Therefore, we embarked on a logo redesign working alongside our design firm this year. How did we get here from the "iTKO" you might have known in the old days?

• The new logo is a departure from the previous ITKO and LISA combined logo.  This is to clearly represent the company name as ITKO (pronounced "eye tee kay oh") from the product, still known as LISA.
• The ITKO logo and usage in text is now all caps -- very bold and clearly recognizable in small digital advertising and product formats as well as having larger, more readable size for both apparel and large signage uses in tradeshows etc.
• LISA, as a separate solution offered by ITKO, will retain a lighter, open box format and keep the "flower" part of the old logo as its product icon in headers, installers, etc. for the software product.

We are also showing a new tagline "Virtualize Everything" as part of this rebranding to help further differentiate our company and our approach around how we help customers simulate their IT environments and eliminate constraints, in large part through virtualization of inaccessible or incomplete services so teams can move forward. To do the job right we recommend you "virtualize everything." The tagline may change from time to time depending on what we are featuring.

The new site has a "big company" feel which becomes more and more important as we continue to grow rapidly and do business with some of the worlds largest organizations. We will continue to enhance our use of video throughout the site. Take a look at the new intro by John on the front page to see an example of high quality video produced entirely in house.  Check out the new look at http://www.ITKO.com and let us know what you think!

Take the voke Survey: What is Agile to You?

"To err is human, to err faster is Agile."

Just got a request to take an Agile Survey from our friends at market analyst firm voke, inc:

We are in the process of conducting a survey on Agile. We will use the data from this survey to create a voke Market Snapshot on Agile, the report will be vendor neutral. I know your customers have very strong opinions about Agile and welcome the participation of as many as possible.

So - here is that survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LNCVQ6H

I took the survey myself and it made me rethink exactly what Agile meant to me - hence the quote at the top. Funny, this comes up almost exactly a year after this blogger commented on Mark Masterson's killer video about Cloud enabling you to fail faster.

Like many terms in the tech world, "Cloud" and "Agile" often get misappropriated for somebody's marketing agenda. But both terms have the intrinsic value of mobility that the business side of the enterprise craves from IT: smaller incremental efforts and costs, and deferred larger decisions, so they aren't going away anytime soon.

I'm quite curious about seeing the results and comments our readers might add to the mix of this survey and the resulting report. ITKO customers generally tend toward the leading edge of what we'd call Enterprise Agile, but we will wager only 50% of them actually refer to their own efforts by the term "Agile." Let's find out!

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!

Has BPM Evolved? Preview of ITKO at Software AG's ProcessWorld Berlin

We'll be heading to Berlin next week to attend Software AG's ProcessWorld 2011 - Europe, and with their recent acquisition of IDS Scheer, this partner is really bringing BPM to the forefront by combining a strong combined product and services offering.

Lately most of our discussions have covered the development, integration and testing infrastructure needed to build software. But we are also being asked, especially by our EMEA customers, has the advance of Service Virtualization and elastic Cloud devtest infrastructure also advanced their ability to successfully execute on a BPM strategy? We think so.

Invoke and Verify is alive and well - and accelerating the delivery of proven BPM processes. This is largely because we are now able to "bridge the gaps" of waiting for human and machine responses, and decrease our dependence on manual verification of results.

Using Service Virtualization, a BPM team can set up automatic, continuous validation processes, with Virtual Services providing the underlying models of dependent mainframes, test data, transaction processes, and user response scenarios needed to ensure process integrity. Non-technical business experts should not only design processes, they should be empowered to self-verify them as well, and that's what LISA's Pathfinder capabilities are all about - one-click reporting and tracing of issue through the infrastructure, so your process guys can get all the details to developers for much higher acceptance and resolution rates.

In light of the need for continuous BPM validation - at ProcessWorld, ITKO's LISA Product Manager Chris Kraus will be presenting a session Wednesday, June 1st - 2:15PM titled:

"Continuous Development, Integration & Test with Virtual Service Environments"

What youll learn: As today’s enterprise applications include more composite elements such as SOA, BPM and Cloud-based services, IT teams struggle to deliver needed software functionality against rapidly increasing complexity and change.  The new technology of Service Virtualization, which captures and simulates the behavior, data and performance characteristics of unavailable or incomplete systems for unconstrained use in development and testing lifecycles, relieves these issues when applied with the right methodology.

Four key capabilities your organization should look for in a Service Virtualization approach can enable extended software dev & test teams to get high quality Software AG-powered applications to market faster, with dramatically lower cost and risk. This session will cover:

• How to provide software dev & test teams with a more Live-like environment  
• Parallel development and testing strategies
• Virtualizing Test Data for out-of-scope systems
• Performance Testing against Virtual Labs

Customer examples of faster software delivery with lower cost and risk will be presented from three leading Software AG-based IT shops in Financial Services, Telecommunications and Retail industries. Come see iTKO in Booth #1 - we're a proud Platinum sponsor of this critical BPM, SOA and integration summit.

 

 

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.