ITKO

ITKO Whitepaper: Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development   Complementing hardware virtualization with a unique and compelling ability to reduce cost and increase business agility across the entire software lifecycle ITKO Whitepaper December 2008 Author(s): John Michelsen, Chief Architect, ITKO PDF document, 1.3MB

Virtualization is hot. But are we realizing its full potential?

Leading technology analysts (and Wall Street financial analysts) cite the adoption of virtualization, broadly defined as the practice of simulating the behavior of a technology asset, as one of the most significant technology priorities of this decade. There is a reason for this excitement - virtualization at the hardware and data center level generates an almost immediate payback in saved IT operations costs - potentially saving several million dollars in IT costs in months, not years.

However, by focusing solely on hardware virtualization concepts, are we leaving opportunities to save time and money on the table? It is significant that we can reduce the cost of servers, but does this represent the bulk of the IT budget? What if we could also apply the benefits of virtualization where we spend 80 percent or more of that budget -- in the enterprise software that runs our business, and the extensive development, support and maintenance costs of these applications?

Market pressures for greater business agility are driving enterprise applications to become more flexible and dynamic. Applications are increasingly assembled from distributed services and components that are shared across departments and organizations on a global scale. When we distribute component or service development tasks across multiple teams, we inevitably find that these teams still need access to live versions of the rest of the application in order to complete their own development and testing goals. There is still a high level of dependency and interconnectedness between all of those teams to deliver a completed workflow. For large-scale enterprise systems, this represents a significant cost and agility challenge.

This paper introduces the practice of Service Virtualization (SV) to address these challenges and provide a key complement to hardware virtualization. Service virtualization entails capturing the behavior of deployed software assets, along with virtualizing the behavior of those not yet in existence, to facilitate the efficient development and testing of dynamic enterprise applications.

This paper also discusses the benefits of the SV approach, and describes the value of SV in the context of a hardware virtualized environment. The opportunities presented by SV offer significant breakthroughs in productivity and agility for the entire enterprise application development and deployment lifecycle.

Read more about LISA Virtualize and Service Virtualization here >>