Independent analyst firm, voke, inc., recently conducted extensive research around the concept of “lifecycle virtualization” and the results of their efforts are incredibly revealing on two levels. On one hand you have the impressive benefits and improvements across the entire SDLC, detailed by those who have implemented lifecycle virtualization, and on the other—the completely devastating feedback from those who have not adopted this increasingly popular technology.
If you’re asking, “what is lifecycle virtualization?” voke, inc. defines it as:
Bringing virtualization to the pre-production portion of the application lifecycle is defined as lifecycle virtualization. Just as server virtualization provides a way for underutilized resources to be efficiently used, lifecycle virtualization allows over-utilized or excessively needed resources to be virtualized and shared across the entire software supply chain.
voke founders Theresa Lanowitz and Lisa Dronzek authored a Market Snapshot that focuses on this concept of lifecycle virtualization, and one of the most interesting things to me personally is that the survey they conducted was focused primarily on the technology of virtual and cloud-based labs.
Obviously this area of the SDLC is of great interest to us here at Skytap. But, I cannot imagine that someone outside of our company would be able to read this report and not be blown away by the changes in the lives of those who changed this one aspect of the way they do their jobs. After learning how frustrating and inefficient the daily work lives can be for those those without virtual and cloud-based labs—it’s difficult to imagine them continuing down that same routine for much longer.
In an earlier interview I did with Theresa Lanowitz, we discussed the topic of “extreme automation” and how leveraging it enables enterprises to eliminate classic computing problems and truly reach the “next generation” of software development.
In looking back at that earlier interview with Theresa, I discovered that she described exactly what voke’s Market Snapshot spells out numerically. Enterprises are absolutely struggling to overcome age-old problems like test environment access, costly hardware maintenance, insufficient test coverage, and bugs making it far too deep into production.
I spoke with Theresa shortly after this Market Snapshot was released and she pointed out one of her favorite quotes that a survey responder provided. “Virtualization is a must, self-service is a must, ‘one-click’ solutions are my dream.”
Thanks to lifecycle virtualization, and the extreme automation of provisioning cloud-based dev/test environments, that person’s dream is now very much a reality.
