Service virtualization isn’t new, but it’s getting renewed interest from some big vendors and for good reason.
Tom Petty said it best when he sang, “The waiting is the hardest part.” When testing applications, waiting for resources, waiting to get the code into production and waiting to deliver high-quality apps to the business can be the most difficult part.
There are several reasons for the wait, but none of them seem to justify the pain it causes. Architects, developers and even operations want to better understand how applications will behave in a production environment. Yet the resources available for testing are often sparse or offered with limitations, and teams working to reduce costs, increase speed to market and improve quality aren’t able to do all three.
That is unless they tap the capabilities in service virtualization technologies, which are now available from ITKO, a CA Technologies company, IBM with its Green Hat acquisition, Parasoft and HP.
“Service virtualization eliminates the wait time for people; people waiting for something to be ready to test, people waiting to have access to resources,” says Theresa Lanowitz, industry analyst and founder of Voke Inc.
In simple terms, service virtualization is a capability that allows testers to remove constraints from the software development lifecycle process. It allows developers, testers and more to test an application on virtual infrastructure that has been configured to imitate a real production environment. Service virtualization enables testing teams to change the variables to prepare for different scenarios as well.
What it doesn’t do is require large upfront capital in terms of infrastructure investment to create an adequate test environment to simulate the real enterprise on which the application will run. It also doesn’t force those testing the app to choose from among the three critical criteria in application development and testing: cost, quality or schedule.
Voke classifies service virtualization as one of five elements within its application lifecycle market, which also includes virtual lab management, defect virtualization, virtualized cloud platforms and device virtualization. Having covered the still young market for several years, Lanowitz says interest in service virtualization is this year heating up as some industry acquisitions prove.
CA Technologies acquired ITKO in the summer of 2011; then soon after HP started to renew interest in its own service virtualization product of the same name, HP Service Virtualization. IBM in January closed its acquisition of Green Hat, a provider of software quality and testing solutions for the cloud and other environments. Now ITKO’s primary competition before the acquisition, niche player Parasoft and its Parasoft Virtualize, has to compete with three of the largest software vendors in the world.
“Operations teams, development teams and the more advanced QA teams are going to know about it and want to know about it. People are becoming more aware,” Lanowitz says. “I have been looking at the market since 2005, and service virtualization is the best kept secret in the market.”
Interested in learning more from industry watchers and peers about service virtualization? Join the service virtualization community and discussion here.