Application Virtualization

Increase Development & Test team efficiency by eliminating dependency on unavailable and inaccessible live systems, and reducing risk across the SDLC

Application Virtualization (AV) is a strategic joint offering from ITKO and IBM that combines ITKO's LISA Software suite with IBM services to provide enterprises with a comprehensive toolset and methodology for helping software delivery teams break away from dependencies. With AV, teams develop and test in parallel, better manage test data, and reduce the number of live dev and test environments required, thereby drastically reduce testing cycle times and delivering critical functionality to customers faster.

AV leverages ITKO's LISA^TM Suite of Virtualization, Validation and End-to-End Testing software, allowing IT organizations to deliver modern applications on time and under budget, with confidence.

Realizing Customer Results

Application Virtualization delivers a proven solution to the problem of system dependency, cost and quality constraints. Significant measured results from recent AV customers include:

• Fortune 100 Global Bank: Avoided $30M in infrastructure and performance lab configuration costs in Year 1 by replacing manually coded "stubs" and responders with LISA Virtual Services.
• Major Telco : Reduced Development & Testing cycle times by 40%+ within the first 3 months of the project, for a first-quarter ROI of 450%.
• Leading Airline: Saved more than $1.5M per month in 3rd-party application access fees
• Property & Casualty Insurer: Reduced cycle times for new IT functionality releases by 6 weeks per 3 month cycle, thereby doubling IT delivery capacity, while decreasing errors discovered in pre-production or production by 90%.

Challenges of Increased App Complexity

Inadequacies with traditional application delivery and testing approaches are exposed as enterprises shift toward more complex, distributed applications, and agile development techniques. While the ability to rapidly develop and deliver new business functionality has increased, net delivery time and costs have actually increased as well. This has led to:

• Less functionality delivered per release, and longer cycle times
• Higher development & testing costs
• Poor production quality of critical software

The unintended consequences of faster development iterations are increased IT environment costs, longer test cycles, and slower net delivery times for critical releases.

In modern application environments, teams often waste time waiting on the dependencies of unavailable systems and unstable test data to develop against. Collaboration suffers as testers cannot create repeatable regression and performance tests. These constraints force QA and Development to conduct time consuming, manual validation of applications, later in their lifecycle, when issues are "baked in" to the system and harder to find and fix.

How Application Virtualization Optimizes the Software Lifecycle

The complete AV solution offered by IBM and ITKO optimizes the enterprise software development process through:

• Virtualizing, or simulating, the behavior of unavailable or incomplete systems to remove dependency constraints
• Greatly reducing Test Data management effort and errors
• Automating Validation processes with continuous or event-based verification across all tiers of the application
• Providing comprehensive Defect collaboration information automatically to developers
• Leveraging the enterprise IT group's existing ALM platforms

Solution: ITKO's LISA Suite

IBM solution delivery teams have built an expert practice in delivering customer results with ITKO's LISA solutions for virtualizing and validating complex, modern applications, including SOA, BPM, Integration suites/ESBs and Cloud-based application services. The combined AV solution offering includes:

• LISA Virtualize: Simulates dynamic behavior, data and performance of apps using Virtual Services, which can be available 24/7 for development and testing purposes to accelerate time-to-market, streamline test data management, and lower infrastructure costs.
• LISA Test: Automated end-to-end testing that verifies software across all application tiers in a "no-code" environment. LISA automates unit, functional, regression, system integration, load and performance testing for improved quality and greater test reuse and efficiency, and natively interoperates with IBM Rational QM, IBM Jazz^TM and other leading ALM and QA platforms.
• LISA Validate: Prevents the unintended consequences of change by validating functional and business outcomes across processes and underlying components, either continuously or based on change events in the lifecycle. Lowers risk and builds trust across distributed systems and teams, and works in conjunction with governance and policy infrastructures.
• LISA Pathfinder: Provides complete transparency and traceability across all application tiers and technologies to quickly identify root cause defects, streamline defect collaboration between Development and QA, and automatically generate detailed regression test suites that reduce reliance on manual testing efforts in the future.

ITKO and IBM: Enabling Cloud Applications

The AV offering is providing proven value to leading enterprises today, and customers can expect to see these solutions available in IBM's Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud.

ITKO helps customers move enterprise applications into the Cloud at lower cost and risk. Our LISA^TM virtualization and validation software optimizes complex applications throughout the software lifecycle, eliminating costly constraints and defects, while improving agility in changing IT environments. ITKO is a partner of IBM Global Services, and our LISA software seamlessly integrates with IBM solutions, including Rational and WebSphere.

For more information, visit http://www.itko.com/ibm, read our blog at http://blog.itko.com, call 1-877-BUY-ITKO (289-4856), or email us at ibmsales@itko.com.