Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the benefits to software development from service and network virtualization.

1. HP Service Virtualization Eases Developer and Operations
Lifecycle Support of Applications at Shunra Software
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the benefits to software development from
service and network virtualization.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. 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.
Gardner
Once again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, and business
results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013
Conference in Barcelona.
We’re here the week of December 9 to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big
data, mobile, and cloud, along with converged infrastructure are all supporting their goals in new
and interesting ways.
Our next innovation case study highlights how Shunra Software is using service virtualization to
help its developer audience, and customer base improve their distribution, creation, and lifecycle
support of applications. They’re also using HP software along the way. We’re going to learn
more about that and how they’re doing with our guest.
We’re here with Todd DeCapua. He’s the Vice President of Channel Operations and Services at
Shunra Software in Philadelphia. Welcome, Todd.
Todd DeCapua: Thank you, Dana. It's great to be here with you today.
Gardner: Let's think a little bit about this marketplace. There are a lot of trends that are affecting
software developers. They’ve got mobile on their minds. They’ve got time issues.
They have speed up how they get it at all, of course, faster, better, cheaper along
the way. What did I miss? What are some of the bigger trends that you’re seeing
in software?
DeCapua: One of the biggest ones that I didn’t hear you mention -- especially
around innovation and thinking about results, specifically business results -- is
Agile. Agile 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

2. 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. Let's focus on what's important to the business, what's important to the customer,
then maybe what's important to IT. How does all that circle around to value?
Gardner: Of course, there are more moving parts these days with mobile. We have many more
networks, and people are grasping how to make 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 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.
DeCapua
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 innovation thoughts 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 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?
DeCapua: When I think of operators, these are people on the operations side of the house. And
you’re right, because as the delivery has sped up through things like Agile, it's your operations

3. team that is sitting there and ultimately has to be the owners of these applications. Service
virtualization and network virtualization can benefit them is by being able to recreate these
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 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-toproduction environment. The operations team can be part of the team that's fixing it, because
again, the ultimate question that I've gotten from CIOs is, “How can you make sure this never
happens again?”
We now have the way to quickly and confidently recreate it 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 very rapid times when they are improved or changed, they have to react to their
markets. How does the 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 left 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 is it that within these continuous integration environments, the 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 BA, 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 functions or that story is going to perform? Let's think about it as
we’re creating that story, not once we get two or three sprints in 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.
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 application programming interfaces

4. (APIs). We’re dealing with outside services. We have 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 service 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 it 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.

5. 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?
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. 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 been engaged on October the 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 left 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? Maybe also 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 LoadRunner, also is now
being built into 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

6. 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.
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 hit on.
So, when you've set up your testing, when you've got 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 30-40
percent. What does that mean for that organization as compared to their competitor. If you can
get to market 30-40 percent faster, it means millions or billions 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.

7. 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 monty if
you will. Any suggestions about skills, organization, how do you get going?
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 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 books and 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 business results this is all for naught.
To get started, there are a number of different pieces that I could 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 and anticipation?

8. Slow down
DeCapua: For vision piece and the future, 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 benefit.
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?
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 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 and virtualization and service virtualization and
partnership with HP for overall improved software-development quality. Please join me in
thanking our guest Todd DeCapua. He is the Vice President of Channel Operations and Services
at Shunra Software. Thank you, Todd.

9. DeCapua: Thank you very much, Dana. I appreciate the opportunity, and thank you, all.
Gardner: And thank you to our audience for joining the special new style of IT 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. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a sponsored 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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