I D C T E C H N O L O G Y S P O T L I G H T
E n a b l i n g Q u a l i t y I n n o v a t i o n w i t h S e r v i c e V i r t u a l i z a t i o n a n d N e t w o r k V i r t u a l i z a t i o n
December 2014
Adapted from Worldwide Automated Software Quality 2014–2018 Forecast and 2013 Vendor Shares: Some Growth in ASQ with Ongoing Adoption Projected for Mobile, Cloud and Embedded, IDC #251643
Sponsored by HP
This Technology Spotlight discusses the factors driving the demand to modernize software quality life-cycle approaches, enabled by network virtualization and service virtualization. Software development demands an evolutionary strategy that moves beyond earlier, fractured tactics and builds in quality throughout the life cycle. Combining quality, network, and service virtualization capabilities could lead to faster release schedules and faster time to market. This in turn can increase competitive advantage by helping grow the customer and revenue base for businesses as a result of improved transaction volumes and innovation. Additional benefits include cost savings from less physical infrastructure in development, testing, and operations (DevTestOps), both for development and testing applications and for application performance optimization by leveraging service and network virtualization. This paper examines the impetus for and benefits of software quality strategies that coordinate network virtualization and service virtualization. It also looks at the role of HP in the dynamic DevTestOps market.
Introduction
Complex software deployments demand a shift in quality approaches, leading to increased adoption of strategies such as service virtualization and network virtualization. Software releases across mobile, cloud, social, and big data require a richer, diversified, and nuanced approach to quality for software execution. The potential impact of network challenges on functionality, performance, and security and the need to identify and address key application design, development, and operations issues that would otherwise not be visible or addressable lead to the need for a combined approach with network virtualization and service virtualization. This kind of combined strategy can enable access to appropriate infrastructure across these environments. An overlay of automated software quality enables reporting and analytics to define, find, and help address problems.
IDC therefore sees these factors and strategies not only enabling visibility into quality, performance, and other issues but also creating the potential for dynamic and coherent approaches for faster, high-quality software releases. Business competitive advantage and innovation rely on software velocity. Cost savings from virtualized quality, service virtualization, and network virtualization are also a key driver for adoption in this area. Examples of related expenses include additional staffing and costs to build and maintain physical infrastructure, as well as the need to recreate network conditions and other elements of production in pre-production environments.
Technology-Fueled Business Transformation Drives Demand for Life-Cycle Virtualization
Businesses will be able to transform:
How they engage with customers
How they innovate products and services
The reliability of their operations
The 3rd Platform is a business platform; one-third of leading businesses will be disrupted by 3rd Platform competitors — quality is critical.
Virtualization can enable quality for all platforms, but let's start on the 3rd Platform (see Figure 1).
F i g u r e 1
Technology-Fueled Business Transformation Drives Demand for Life -Cycle Virtualization
Source: IDC, 2014
Addressing Software Development and Performance Challenges
Increasingly, software execution is characterized by complexity; software execution and deployment across mobile and other platforms are dependent on factors that go well beyond traditional
approaches to development and software quality. Increasingly, organizations must coordinate quality strategies with the networks and infrastructure on which software is or will be deployed. Yet,
frequently, the efforts in those areas are completed by disparate staff that are fractured
geographically and organizationally with little visibility or coordination (including internal teams as well as external service providers and partners).
Network latency, bandwidth, and packet loss and jitter are some factors making up network
conditions that can cause prevailing challenges and software that does not perform well or securely.
Organizations continue to lag in their efforts to discover and analyze networks and build in this network impact to create relevant development, test, and operations environments. This gap creates software risk and performance challenges as a result of the lack of visibility and lack of opportunity for improvement and optimization. In short, factoring the network into testing increases test accuracy and helps avoid false positive test results.
Enabling corporate approaches for effective deployment involves discovering and capturing, emulating, and analyzing information to help optimize applications. Given that those doing quality work typically have limited to no control over the networks, particularly in multi-modal environments (e.g., mobile, social, big data and cloud), this functionality can provide key visibility. Organizations that leverage software quality in combination with service virtualization and network virtualization have the opportunity to proactively design, develop, and test their applications to perform and be secure in the context of challenging real-world network conditions.
Separate teams, partners, disparate code sources (including open source) and far-flung resources that span organizational boundaries with Agile approaches drive velocity of collaboration and of code deployment. At the same time, they also create greater risk, complexity, and demand for automation for service virtualization and network virtualization. In this context, the primary pain points of tactical, uncoordinated approaches to quality include lack of visibility into core networks and infrastructure, which creates risk; impacts performance, functionality, and security; and leads to a lack of shared information that impacts software execution. This kind of approach can be costly, risky, and time consuming and can straitjacket business agility.
Proactive Quality and Life-Cycle Virtualization for Application Performance
Ideally, companies should have clear visibility into the networks on which their applications depend.
This visibility can help teams understand network impact on software to improve test design, performance, and automation. Making this approach intuitive, repeatable, and leverageable by environments such as mobile and Web, which continue to be ubiquitous and highly exposed, is becoming business critical. Virtualization enables ease of creation and control in these combined environments, which would otherwise not be possible.
But while automation of service virtualization and network virtualization and quality is a key first step, without cultural change and adoption across the organization, it remains insufficient. Evaluation and adoption of emerging tools in these combined environments must be coupled with effective process and organizational strategies to enable a transition across disparate network, development, quality, and operations teams. These groups are separated by function, focus, and organizational strata.
Creating common processes and a communication workflow across quality, development, networking, and operations is critical. It is part of the work of moving toward a comprehensive, end-to-end DevTestOps software creation and deployment strategy.
The Business Value of a Combined Quality, Service Virtualization, and Network Virtualization Approach
The benefits to be gained by deploying network virtualization, service virtualization, and quality automation include creating a comprehensive management solution for faster, optimized application deployments and to help manage software performance and risk. (This is particularly important for business-critical systems.) Other benefits that can accrue include increasing software velocity to support business responsiveness to dynamic, global competitive pressures. (In a global economy and an international setting that remain volatile, this becomes key for businesses.) Effective leverage of higher-quality and better-performing software assets through visibility into often invisible network aspects of application performance and management can enable faster responses to competitive challenges (since software is the basis for business responsiveness). Increased acceleration and value can also leverage Agile to enable DevTestOps transformations, building in and enabling production environments. And the cost savings of virtualization and reuse in an economy that remains volatile are obvious benefits.
Key Emerging Trends for Automated Software Quality and Performance Virtualization
The total market size for automated software quality (ASQ) in 2013 was $2.4 billion, up 2.5% from 2012 (which experienced 5.7% growth to $2.36 billion). So growth that continued in 2013 did so at levels that were slightly lower than we had expected because of the impact of revenue declines from some major vendors, a somewhat challenging buying and investment environment (improving now in 2014), and some initial impact on commercial offerings by open source software (such as Selenium).
Despite these factors in 2013, we remain bullish on ASQ, with significant demand emerging in 2014 as a result of complex software deployments occurring in mobile, embedded, social, and big data environments enabled by and delivered in on-premise and hybrid cloud environments.
The expected 2014–2018 CAGR for the ASQ market is 6.1%, with revenue expected to reach
$3.2 billion by 2018 (this ASQ CAGR is up slightly from our 2012–2017 CAGR of 6.0%). These growth numbers are significant in a worldwide economy that remains volatile. Demand from businesses for competitive advantage driven by software innovation for a variety of multimodal environments including mobile and cloud (testing for and in the cloud), compounded by widespread adoption of social business and applications that carry additional risk and complexity, is pushing increased adoption of software quality tools. The emergence of embedded software quality
capabilities to enable product innovation will continue throughout the forecast period and is beginning to kick in currently. Acquisitions in the embedded space and in the application performance
management arena exemplify growing coordination across high-growth areas in which ASQ plays a key emerging role. The use of service virtualization as part of an effective deployment strategy and the feeding of end-to-end life-cycle approaches are key to IDC's DevTestOps definition.
While release management and deployment sit in the software configuration, code, and process management market primarily, the transition from pre-deployment to deployment must involve effective ASQ strategies and handoff to production — if not already integrated and automated.
(Too frequently, organizations consider DevTestOps as merely encompassing software release management without including a broader view.) This also means leverage of the key areas of network virtualization and service virtualization as part of optimization application performance and quality for DevTestOps.
Considering HP Software
HP remains in a dominant position in ASQ market with around 31% market share ($759 million in 2013). As a result of its acquisition of leading network virtualization provider Shunra (April 2014), HP is well positioned from a product portfolio perspective to be successful in this combined area of life-cycle virtualization for application performance. The combined capabilities enable HP to unite its existing service virtualization functionality and its position and strength in ASQ with network
virtualization, resulting in a differentiated integrated capability.
HP's broad product portfolio offers the potential to coordinate data across the HP product set for analytics that leverage information across all three areas to be able to discover, emulate, and optimize applications while also supporting coordinated development, test, and operations
environments (with service virtualization and automated function/performance/security testing). This portfolio differentiates HP from its competition because it brings together HP's quality (ALM) and service virtualization offerings and pre-existing (11+ years) integration with HP's network virtualization portfolio. In addition, HP is in the process of providing services and process capabilities to support appropriate adoption of its automated solutions. HP is also evolving the platforms targeted with new mobile offerings and looking to expand support across its emerging SaaS and cloud strategy,
specifically with the load testing functionality available with HP StormRunner Load and mobile testing with HP Mobile Center released in 4Q14.
From a go-to-market perspective, HP's application delivery management suites seek to provide insight and automation to help enable an application life-cycle approach that can integrate
development environments and processes. HP's intent is to help automate processes and testing to be able to better predict impact across the life cycle and to accelerate application performance for users, services, networks, and data. HP is seeking to address customer requirements in the following core areas:
Integration: To provide traceability, visibility, and shared information across the life cycle to enable closed feedback loops and to support delivery processes such as Agile and DevTestOps;
to enable consistent delivery while blending traditional and new delivery processes and be able to scale Agile to the enterprise in a certified manner (SAFe)
Automation: To provide automated and continuous integration and testing capabilities across functionality, performance, and security to ensure continuous quality; to enable consistent brand experience and end-user satisfaction from apps while speeding up delivery cycles with
automation
Prediction: To provide an open platform with integrated data sources to help customers prioritize efforts by leveraging big data throughout the life cycle to aid in contextual decision making; to enable improved quality and delivery — to find issues earlier in the life cycle and to provide actionable information to better predict application release success
Acceleration: To help customers develop and test faster by virtualizing constrained resources;
to enable reduced costs and the ability to rapidly adapt to change for velocity within the delivery life cycle
HP Network Virtualization (NV) products seek to enable users to discover and capture; emulate and test; and analyze and optimize applications with the following features:
Discover and Capture
Global Library: As context for users, includes tens of millions of data points for mobile and LAN connections from tens of thousands of cities
Network Capture: Application to enable users to capture point-to-point network conditions from within their production infrastructure
Network Capture Express: Free mobile app that enables users to capture and share network conditions from their mobile devices worldwide
Emulate and Test
NV for LoadRunner and Performance Center: Incorporates network conditions across user types (mobile, corporate, LAN, WiFi), representative of production environments, to help obtain accurate results for end users and back-end infrastructure
NV for Service Virtualization: Enables users to incorporate network conditions into simulated services or other infrastructure components
NV for Mobile: Incorporates a variety of network conditions into mobile functional, performance, and security tests
NV for Desktop: From the desktop, lets users recreate the experience of current or future remote users and/or the impact of a datacenter relocation or consolidation
Analyze and Optimize
NV Analytics: Provides automated optimization recommendations at a code level so that fixes can be incorporated prior to the next release, helping improve application performance
HP Service Virtualization (SV) products enable users to capture or create services or other infrastructure components to simulate environments with the following features:
SV Designer: Enables users to capture or create services or other infrastructure components either within the datacenter or as shared remote services
SV Server: Enables users to run these services, providing them to key stakeholders for use in development, test, or operations activities
Released at the end of October, HP's most recent products, which incorporate network virtualization capabilities, include:
StormRunner Load: Load testing from the cloud, enabling users to simply and quickly run large virtual user load tests at lower costs than other HP solutions
Mobile Center: Provides HP testing capabilities for mobile devices, supporting development and testing of mobile apps
Market Challenges and Opportunities
Challenges
Lack of education and awareness about the connection to and importance of combining quality with network and service virtualization is a barrier to adoption. (It's hard to know to do something if it's not easily visible.) Organizational and process barriers exist because the groups in these areas typically haven't worked together. Yet the market for this area is emerging; combined technology approaches with process support can help bridge the divide. HP's acquisition of Shunra (a network virtualization provider) in 2Q14 exemplifies HP's improved execution in 2014 compared with the prior year.
Shunra's leading place in the market and augmentation of the HP portfolio with highly synergistic products in a key, dynamic market indicate the opportunities available to HP in this new context across its software portfolio.
Opportunities
Coordinated quality, network, and service virtualization approaches offer key visibility and performance benefits to emerging environments; enable reuse; dynamic development and deployment; and an end-to-end life-cycle/DevTestOps approach, which would otherwise not be possible (including security benefits). Another key opportunity with HP is its differentiated positioning for ASQ — due to broader adoption, skill set demand, and prevalence of organizations to adopt products in this key area. HP is taking an aggressive go-to-market approach with regard to this opportunity, leveraging its Shunra acquisition with the combined solutions currently being released.
Evaluate and Adopt Combined Application Performance Virtualization Approaches Across the Life Cycle
IDC recommends that organizations adopt combined approaches for quality, service, and network virtualization so that companies and users can create, understand, and leverage managed, coherent development and performance management approaches. Organizations across the board should incorporate broader quality virtualization strategies to gain the benefits of improved visibility, collaboration, and business alignment with improved software reuse and cost benefits. Automated tool adoption must be accompanied by process and organizational change to enable the shift. Also, success is not merely a result of technology adoption; cultural change is vital across network, quality, and operations teams that are frequently disconnected from one another.
Organizations should shift organizational and process approaches to adopt a managed strategy that coordinates service and network virtualization. They should evaluate the gap between current behavior and maturity and adopt effective automated tools to support the transition. Bridging the gap across quality, network, and service virtualization is a business imperative for organizations globally.
Software quality depends on visibility into network analytics. Combining virtualization across
environments can enable improved visibility, response, innovation, and business adaptability for the software on which companies depend increasingly for competitive position.
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