CA Technologies wants to educate South African businesses on the benefits of service virtualisation, saying uptake is slow because of a lack of trust.
This emerged on the sidelines of the CA IT Management Symposium Africa 2012, when ITWeb interviewed Justin Vaughan-Brown, CA Technologies' strategic relationships director for EMEA.
According to Vaughan-Brown, in Africa, service virtualisation is still in the early stages. “We are still having some discussions with a number of customers on the continent and within South Africa and we are hoping to have a customer in the not too distant future,” he said.
He revealed that CA Technologies had very positive conversations at the symposium with potential clients.
“I think trust is lacking. Our job is now to explain how to take that step and understand and see all the benefits and show the customers how service virtualisation will work in an organisation - who would use it in development and testing teams? How they would expand it because this is a new technology.
“These are baby steps, but we will help them to ensure they are successful and they can promote that success to the business,” said Vaughan-Brown.
The uptake of service virtualisation has been very quick in North America, where ITKO, a company that developed the technology, is headquartered, he revealed. “The company was very much focused on North America. What's happening now, particularly since ITKO's acquisition by CA Technologies, is that the technology has expanded to Europe, Middle East and Africa, as well as Asia-Pacific.”
The bigger, the better
“We are focusing on the very large enterprises, which have lots of different, complex applications. These include a mixture of middle-layer customer relationship management; ERP systems, such as SAP; mainframe technology, etc.
“Unfortunately, our focus is more on the larger enterprises. It is really where it makes business sense unless if it is a mid-market company with a big development team as well as a complex application environment. We are not trying to be everything to everyone.”
Typically, Vaughan-Brown elaborated, the company is targeting the banking, insurance and telecommunications sectors. “The reason is because all three of these sectors operate in very competitive environments. Customers are constantly expecting new applications and new services. All the companies in these sectors are competing for a limited number of customers.
“So the development teams are asked by the business every year to come up with wonderful new innovative services and applications that these customers can use. But often, they have to do this with a limited budget or functionality.”
App behaviour simulation
Defining service virtualisation, Vaughan-Brown said it's neither the hardware virtualisation nor server virtualisation that the majority of organisations are familiar with.
“It's not something like VMware. Service virtualisation is the simulation of the behaviour of applications and parts of an environment that are typically unavailable. usually because there is a high demand for them or simply because the applications haven't been developed yet.
“So we can virtualise and simulate the behaviour of these to save an enormous amount of development and testing time; it improves the quality of the application that you develop and massively reduces your infrastructure costs.”
He also revealed that service virtualisation was started by ITKO back in 2007. CA Technologies acquired ITKO in summer last year. “ITKO originated and patented a way of overcoming the problems that development teams had in terms of not understanding how applications would behave when they were integrated or working together,” Vaughan-Brown explained.
As a result, he added, ITKO developed a way of recording and listening to the way in which applications interacted with each other.
He also noted that, since 2007, when the technology was patented, “we are beginning to see other companies copying and following. But in terms of a large number of referenceable customers, we remain very much the leader in that space.
“I think in the next five to 10 years, we are going to see increased adoption rates of service virtualisation. If we look at the people who are using service virtualisation, they never look back. It's like 15 years ago when we started using e-mail. Once people started using it and realised its benefits, they never went back to the old ways.”
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