iTKO Announces Significant Customer and Software Testing Progress for the Insurance Industry
LISA Provides Complete, Collaborative and Continuous Testing for Major Life, Annuity and Property and Casualty/Surety Applications
Dallas, TX, December 18 2006 - iTKO, Inc., a provider of complete testing solutions for SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) software, today announced that its flagship product, the LISAtm 3.5 Complete SOA Test Platform is providing complete, collaborative and continuous testing of service-oriented applications within several leading insurance industry companies.
As an entry point to achieving more flexible systems architectures, insurance companies are adopting cross-industry Web Services standards including SOAP 1.1, SOAP Messages with attachments, HTTP 1.1, SSL/TLS and WSS 1.0. iTKO innately tests these technology standards out of the box with their LISA 3.5 Complete SOA Test Platform and LISA WS-Testingtm web services testing tool.
"We've seen insurance companies take two approaches to service-orientation, and both require thorough testing to succeed," said John Michelsen, Founder and Chief Architect, iTKO. "There is an 'evolutionary' strategy of building on top of the existing enterprise systems, or a 'revolutionary' strategy of designing a new infrastructure to meet future needs. Both strategies have benefits and challenges that demand that quality is built into the change process."
Complete SOA applications are more than just Web services, and insurance industry SOA applications are no exception. Insurance companies have formed an organization known as ACORD: a global, nonprofit insurance association whose mission is to facilitate the development and use of standards for the insurance, reinsurance and related financial services industries.
The organization has developed two standards for seamless data communications within the industry itself. ACORD XML for Life & Annuity is a family of specifications for the industry designed to enable real-time, cross platform business partner message/information sharing. ACORD XML for Property and Casualty/Surety defines P&C/Surety transactions that include both request and response messages for Accounting, Claims, Personal Lines, Commercial Lines, Specialty Lines and Surety transactions.
"We are committed to forwarding quality as a key part of SOA Governance for the industry," said iTKO CEO Shridhar Mittal. "Both leading insurance industry customer wins and increased interest reflect the fact that LISA supports both legacy integrations and the strategic platforms these companies are moving toward."
LISA provides XML schema and DTD validation, so messages received from the services and implemented systems under test can be automatically validated to meet the ACORD XML standards.
Additionally, the XPath driven XML assertions in LISA 3.5 are highly valuable as most of the Web service interfaces defined by ACORD XML are document based; meaning the parameters and results are actual XML documents instead of simple arguments. The XML assertions also provide an easy to use GUI to make advanced comparisons on XML results.
"We have been able to continually differentiate ourselves from the competition because of our ability to test multiple interfaces inside one tool or inside a single test case," said Michelsen. "With our ability to test services and software specific to the insurance industry, we have taken our expertise to the next level, bringing specific support to organizations who understand the value of standards and quality assurance."
In addition, iTKO offers its LISA WS-Testing solution with a free license, so insurance companies can get started with Web Services testing today, while planning for testing across multiple layers of an SOA application as their development strategy matures. The free download and license for LISA WS-Testing is available at http://www.itko.com/ws-testing.
iTKO's LISA 3.5 Complete SOA Test Platform offers complete, collaborative and continuous testing that communicates directly with the business logic within SOA-based composite applications. LISA enables entire teams to deliver software quality throughout the SOA development and deployment lifecycle. As a key component of SOA Governance, iTKO solutions provide Lifecycle Quality to ensure that the policies of the business are executed continuously at design and runtime.
About iTKO
iTKO, Inc. offers the most complete software suite for testing Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), allowing multiple business technology layers to be exercised within a single test case. iTKO's mission is to allow everyone involved in IT to own Complete, Collaborative, and Continuous(tm) software quality, from development, to QA and business analysts. iTKO LISA Complete SOA Testing Platform system performs unit, functional, regression, load and performance tests, without requiring test coding or script maintenance, saving up to 80% of the cost of testing over the course of six months. For dynamic web applications, web services, J2EE, .NET, Java objects, JMS/messaging, databases, and many more technologies, LISA provides live interaction with every layer, and gives everyone the "Freedom-to-Test" applications exactly as they will be deployed. Founded in 1999, the Dallas-based company's customers include Sun, Capgemini, Cardinal Health, AMD, TIBCO and i2.
http://www.itko.com
iTKO Press Contact: Jason English, VP Corporate Marketing - Jason.English@iTKO.com -- 214-764-9318