Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the benefits to software
development from greater use of service and network virtualization.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the
HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on
IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.
Once
again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the
new style of IT to improve IT performance, deliver better user experiences, and
boost business results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the recent HP
Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.
We’re here to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how
big data,
mobile, and
cloud -- along with
converged infrastructure -- are supporting their goals in new and interesting ways.
Our next innovation case study highlights how
Shunra Software uses
service virtualization
to help its developer users to improve the distribution, creation, and lifecycle of software applications. To learn how, we're joined by
Todd DeCapua, Vice President of Channel Operations and Services at Shunra Software, based in Philadelphia. Welcome, Todd.
Todd DeCapua: Thank you, Dana. It's great to be here with you.
Gardner: Let's think a little bit about this market. There are a lot of
trends affecting software developers. They have mobile on
their minds. They have time constraints issues. They have to be faster, better, and cheaper along the apps lifecycle way. What among the trends is most important for developers?
DeCapua: One of the biggest ones -- especially around innovation and thinking about
results, specifically business results -- is
Agile.
Agile development is something that, fortunately, we've had an opportunity to work
with quite a bit. Our capabilities are all structured around not only
what you talked about with cloud and mobile, but we look at things like
the speed, the quality, and ultimately the value to the customers.
We’re
really focusing on these
business results, which sometimes get lost,
but I try to always go back to them. We need to focus on what's important to
the business, what's important to the customer, and then maybe what's
important to IT. How does all that circle around to value?
Gardner: With mobile we have
many more networks, and people are grasping at how to attain quality before
actually getting into production. How does service virtualization come
to bear on that?
Distributed devices
DeCapua: As you look at almost every organization today, something is distributed. Their customers might be on
mobile devices
out in the real world, and so are distributed. They might be working
remotely from home. They might have a distribution center or a truck
that has a mobile device on it.
There
are all these different pieces. You’re right. Network is a significant
part that unfortunately many organizations have failed to notice and
failed to consider, as they do any type of testing.
Network virtualization
gives you that capability. Where service virtualization comes into play
is looking at things like speed and quality. What if the services are
not available? Service virtualization allows you to then make them
available to your developers.
In the early stage,
where
Shunra has been able to really play a huge difference in these
organizations is by bringing network virtualization in with service
virtualization. We’re able to recreate their production environments
with 100 percent scale -- all prior to production.
Getting
back to the idea of innovation, some people are seeing these as
innovations of a test environment. When we think about the value
to the business, now you’re able to deliver the product working. So, it
is about the speed to market, quality of product, and ultimately value to
your customer and to your business.
Gardner: And
another constituency that we should keep in mind are those
all-important operators. They’re also dealing with a lot of moving parts
these days -- transformation, modernization, and picking and choosing
different ways to host their
data centers. How do they fit into this and how does service virtualization cut across that continuum to improve the lives of operators?
Service virtualization and network virtualization can benefit them is by being able to recreate these scenarios.
DeCapua: You’re right, because as the delivery has sped up through
things like Agile, it's your operations team that is sitting there and
ultimately has to be the owners of these applications. Service
virtualization and network virtualization can benefit them by being
able to recreate these in-production scenarios.
Unfortunately, there
are still some reactive actions required in production today, so you’re
going to have a production incident. But, you can now understand the
network in production, capture those conditions, and recreate that in
the test environment. You can also do the same for the services.
We
now have the ability to quickly and easily recreate a production
incident in a prior-to-production environment. The operations team can
be part of the team that's fixing it, because again, the ultimate
question from CIOs is, “How can you make sure this
never happens again?”
We now have the way to quickly
and confidently recreate incidents and fix it the first time, not having to
change code in production, on the fly. That is one of the scariest
moments in any of the times when I've been at the customer site or when I
was an employee and had to watch that happen.
Agile iterations
Gardner:
As you mentioned earlier, with Agile, we’re seeing many more iterations
on applications as they need to be rapidly improved or changed. How does service and network
virtualization aid in being able to produce many more iterations of an
application, but still maintain that high quality?
DeCapua:
One of our customers actually told us that -- prior to leveraging network
virtualization with service virtualization -- he was doing 80 percent of
his testing in-production, simply because he knew the shortcomings, and
he needed to test it, but he had no way of re-creating it. Now, let's
think about Agile. Let's think about how we shift and get the
proven enterprise tools in the developer’s hands sooner, more often, so
that we can drive quality early in the process.
That's
where these two components play a critical role. As you look at it more
specifically and go just a hair deeper, how in integrated environments can you provide continuous development and
continuous deployment? And with all that automated testing that you’re
already doing, how you can incorporate performance into that? Or, as I
call it, how do you “build performance in” from the beginning?
As a business person, a developer, a business analyst, or a
Scrum Master,
how is it that you’re building performance into your user scenarios
today? How is it that you’re setting them up for understanding how that
feature or function is going to perform? Let's think about
it as we’re creating, not once we get two or three sprints into use
and we have our hardening sprint, where we’re going to run our
performance scenario. Let's do it early, and let's do it often.
Get the proven enterprise tools in the developer’s hands sooner, more often, so that we can drive quality early in the process.
Gardner:
If we’re really lucky, we can control the world and the environment
that we live in, but more often than not these days, we’re dealing with third-party
application programming interfaces (APIs).
We’re dealing with outside web services. We have organizational boundaries that are being
crossed, but things are happening across that boundary that we can't
control.
So, is there a benefit here, too, when we’re
dealing with composite applications, where elements of that mixed service character are
not available for your insight, but that you need to be able to
anticipate and then react quickly should a change occur?
DeCapua:
I can't agree with you more. It’s funny, I am kind of laughing here,
Dana, because this morning I was riding the metro in Barcelona and
before I got to the stop here, I looked down to my phone, because I was
expecting a critical email to come in. Lo and behold, my phone pops up a
message and says, “We’re sorry, service is unavailable.”
I could clearly see that I had one out of five bars on the
Orange network, and I was on the
EDGE network. So, it was about a
2.5G
connection. I should still have been able to get data, but my phone
simply popped up and said, “Sorry, cannot retrieve email because of a
poor data connection.”
I started thinking about it
some more, and as I was engaging with other folks today at the show, I
asked them why is it that the developer of the application found it
necessary to alert me three times in a row that it couldn’t get my email
because of a poor data connection? Why didn’t it just not wait 30
seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds until it did, and then have it reach out
and query it again and pull the data down?
Changing conditions
This
is just one very simple example that I had this morning. And you’re
right, there are constantly changing conditions in the world.
Bandwidth,
latency,
packet loss
and jitter are those conditions that we’re all exposed to every day. If
you’re in a BMW driving down the road at 100 miles per hour, that car
is now a mobile phone or a mobile device on wheels, constantly in
communication. Or if you’re riding the metro or the tube and you have
your mobile device on your hands, there are constantly changing
conditions.
Network virtualization and service
virtualization give you the ability to recreate those scenarios so that
you can build that type of resiliency into your applications and,
ultimately, the customers have the experience that you want them to
have.
Gardner: Todd, tell us a bit
about Shunra and your application-performance engineering solutions?
DeCapua: So,
application performance engineering (APE)
is something that was created within the industry over a number of
years. It's meant to be a methodology and an approach. Shunra plays a
role in that.
A lot of people had thought about it as
testing. Then people thought about it as
performance testing. At the
next level, many of us in the industry have defined it is
application
engineering. It’s a lot more than just that, because you need to dive
behind the application and understand the in’s and the out’s. How does
everything tie together?
Understanding APE will help you to reduce those types of production incidents.
You’d
mentioned some of the composite applications and the complexities
there -- and I’m including the endpoints or the devices or mobile devices
connecting through it. Now, you introduce cloud into the equation, and
it gets 10 times worse.
Thinking about APE, it's more
of an art and a skill. There is a science behind it. However, having
that APE background knowledge and experience gives you the ability to go
into these composite apps, go into these cloud deployments, and
leverage the right tools and the right process to be able to quickly
understand and optimize the solutions.
Gardner:
It's fairly obvious to me, but I do get this question from time to time.
Why aren’t the older scripting and test-bed approaches to quality
control good enough? Why can't we keep doing what we've been doing?
DeCapua:
This question is very often asked of me, too. In the United States recently,
October 1 of 2013, there was a
large healthcare system being rolled out
across the country. Unfortunately, they used the old testing
methodologies and have had
some significant challenges. HP and Shunra
were both engaged on October 2 to assist.
Understanding
APE will help you to reduce those types of production incidents. All
due to inaccurate results in the test environment, using the current
methodologies, about 50 percent of our customers come to us in a crisis
mode. They say, “We just had this issue, I know that you told us this is
going to happen, but we really need your help now.”
They’re
also thinking about how to shift and how to build performance in
all these components -- just have it built in, have it be automatic, and
get the results that are accurate.
Coming together
Gardner: Of course
HP has service virtualization,
you have network virtualization. How are they coming together? Explain the relationship and how
Shunra and HP together go to market?
DeCapua: To many people's surprise, this
relationship is more than a decade old. Shunra’s network-virtualization
capability has, for a long time, been built in to HP
LoadRunner, also is now being built into HP
Performance Center.
There are other capabilities that we have that are built into their
Unified Functional Testing (UFT)
products. In addition, within service virtualization, we’re now
building that product into there. It’s one that, when you think about
anything that has some sort of distribution or network involved, network
virtualization needs to come into play.
Some people
have a hard time initially understanding the service virtualization
need, but a very simple example I often use is an organization like a
bank. They’ll have a credit check as you’re applying for a loan. That
credit check is not going to be a service that the bank creates. They’re
going to outsource it to one of the many credit-check services. There
is a network involved there.
In your test environment,
you need to recreate that and take that into consideration as a part of
your end-to-end testing, whether it's functional, performance, or load.
It doesn’t matter.
In your test environment, you need to recreate that and take that into
consideration as a part of your end-to-end testing, whether it's
functional, performance, or load.
As we think
about Shunra, network virtualization and the very tight partnership that
we've had with HP for service virtualization, as well as their ability
to virtualize the users, it's been an OEM relationship. Our
R and D
teams sit together as they’re doing the development so that this is a
seamless product for the HP customer to be able to get the benefit and
value for their business and for their customers.
Gardner:
Let's talk a little bit about what you get when you do this right. It
seems to me the obvious point is getting to the problem sooner, before
you’re in production, extending across network variables, across other
composite application-type variables. But, I’m going to guess that there
are some other benefits that we haven't yet hit on.
So,
when you've set up you're testing, when you have virtualization as your
tool, what happens in terms of paybacks? Not just the obvious ones, but
it seems to me that this becomes a strategic benefit, influencing your
business in terms of your overall performance, not just your
application's performance.
DeCapua: There are
many benefits there, which we have already covered. There are dozens
more that we could get into. One that I would highlight, being able to
pull all the different pieces that we've been talking about, are shorter
release times.
TechValidate
did a survey in February of 2013. The findings were very compelling in
that they found a global bank was able to speed up their deployment or
application delivery by 30 to 40 percent. What does that mean for that
organization as compared to their competitor? If you can get to market
30 to 40 percent faster, it means millions or billions of dollars over time. Talk about numbers
of customers or brands, it's a significant play there.
Rapid deployment
There
are other things like rapid deployment. As we think about Agile and
mobile, it's all about how fast we get this feature function out,
leveraging service virtualization in a greater way, and reducing
associated costs.
In the example that I shared, the
customer was able to virtualize the users, virtualize the network, and
virtualize the services. Prior to that, he would never have been able to
justify the cost of rebuilding a production environment for test.
Through user virtualization, network virtualization, and service
virtualization, he was able to get to 100 percent at a fraction of the
cost.
Time and time again we mention automation. This
is a key piece of how you can test early, test often, ultimately driving
these accurate results and getting to the automated optimization
recommendations.
Gardner: How about getting
started for organizations that have been doing traditional testing?
Perhaps they’ve been using some HP products but they’ve been resisting
going the full service virtualization monty, if you will. Any suggestions about skills,
organization, how do you get started?
Let's start with that small scale, doing it right, and delivering that speed, quality, and value.
DeCapua:
The most fun piece for me is that you actually need to do something. I
can't tell you how many times I get started, and people say, “Yeah, this
is a great idea. Yeah, it's wonderful.” They walk out of one of the
session at HP Discover and they say, “Yes, I love it. Yeah, I've got my
next three things that I need to do.”
It’s more than a
tool. It’s really about the
people. How is it that you can get this
vision? Maybe it starts with one simple business case. Let's go through
what that business case is to help me to understand what's the value to
your organization. Can we calculate out some
return on investment (ROI)? Can we get to what is the break-even point of this investment?
I
hate to start talking about business and I hate to start talking about
metrics. But as we look at the history of innovation, or what it
means with the new style of IT, being able to improve IT performance,
delivering the better user experience, and ultimately, who is paying the
bill -- it's the business. So, if we can't deliver better business results, this
is all for naught.
To get started, there are a number
of different pieces that I recommend. But rather than create this
huge strategy and everything else, what I would recommend doing is -- I
hate to use the term “
minimum viable product,” but really that's what I hear when I am in the smaller startup organizations.
It's,
“What is that minimum viable product? How can we deliver the most value
with the least investment in the shorter period of time, show that
incremental value, and then start expanding it more?” It could be
expanding it to other teams. It could be expanding it into the other
business units, and then it could be going to the entire enterprise.
But, let's start with that small scale, doing it right, and delivering
that speed, quality, and value.
Gardner: Before
we wrap it up, I’d like to just look a bit into the future. Things have
been moving so rapidly. What comes next in terms of software
productivity? Where should organizations be thinking in terms of vision?
Slow down
DeCapua:
I see Agile, mobile, and cloud. There
are some significant risks out in the marketplace today. As
organizations look to leverage these capabilities to benefit their
business and the customers, maybe they need to just slow down for a
moment and not create this huge strategy, but go after “How can I
increase my revenue stream by 20 percent in the next 90 days?” Another
one that I've had great success with is, “What is that highest
visibility, highest risk project that you have in your organization
today?”
As I look at
The Wall Street Journal, and I
read the headlines everyday, it's scary. But, what's coming in the
future? We can all look into our crystal balls and say that this is what
it is. Why not focus on one or two small things of what we have now,
and think about how we’re mitigating our risk of looking at larger
organizations that are making commitments to migrate critical
applications into the cloud?
You’re biting off a
fairly significant risk, which that there isn’t a lot there to catch you
when you do it wrong, and, quite frankly, nearly everybody is doing it
wrong. What if we start small and find a way to leverage some of these
new capabilities? We can actually do it right, and then start to realize
some of the benefits from cloud, mobile, and other channels that your
organization is looking to.
Gardner: I
guess, too, the role of software keeps increasing in many organizations.
It's not a tool. It's becoming the business itself and, as a
fundamental part of the business, requires lots of tender love and
care, right?
The more that we can think about that and tune ourselves and make
ourselves lean and focused on delivering better quality products, we’re
going to be in the winning circle more often.
DeCapua: You got it. The only other bit that I would add on to that is looking at the
World Quality Report that was presented this morning by HP,
Capgemini, and
Sogeti,
they highlighted that there is an increased spend from the IT budget,
and a rather significant increase in spend from last year in testing.
It’s
exactly what you’re saying. Organizations didn’t enter the market
thinking of themselves as a software house. But time and time again,
we’re seeing how people who treat what they do as a software house
ultimately is improving not only life for their internal customers, but
also their external customers.
So I think you’re
right. The more that we can think about that and tune ourselves and make
ourselves lean and focused on delivering better quality software products, we’re
going to be in the winning circle more often.
Gardner:
Well, very good. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been
learning about how Shunra Software is improving its network virtualization and service virtualization in partnership with HP for
overall improved software-development quality. Please join me in
thanking our guest Todd DeCapua, Vice President of Channel
Operations and Services at Shunra Software. Thank you, Todd.
DeCapua: Thank you very much, Dana. I appreciate the opportunity, and thank you all.
Gardner:
Yes, thanks to our audience for joining the special
discussion coming to you from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in
Barcelona. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
your host for this on-going series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks
again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the benefits to software
development from service and network virtualization. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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