Service Virtualization, again it's a brand new concept, but we already had Parasoft. Now we are trying to gauge the synergy between the product lines which is good.

Actually, sometimes we use the tools that are not exactly in the category of
virtualization to do testing in a similar way. The tools are some kind of like an API
gateway where we can simulate virtualization. And there is another tool called
MounteBank, which is freeware. It can allow us to make a mock or stub server for
integration testing the same to virtual service.

However, we use it only in cases where the TPS or the scale of the capacity is not
projected to be very high. When we need enterprise software, then we switch. What
mean enterprise; 1) having official technical support 2) having R&D team and
roadmap 3) Having official customer reference and so on.

We were not using a different solution. One of my customers wanted to make sure that they heard about it, and they wanted to go in that direction.

Then I went to the market, performed a lot of Google research, and then I called a vendor. They came in and did a lot of presentations to help the customer to understand what they have. Then, we had our own matrix in place while the vendor selection took place and we decided which product to take.

We contacted the top three vendors again and asked their solutions architect to design a prototype in our environment. We identified tone prototype that had a good thing, but two had nothing. At the end of the day, nobody was perfect, but HPE was the best.

Going into the purchase of HP Service Virtualization, prior to the purchase we actually ran into quite a few gotchas with third parties, with integrations, internal integrations where teams weren’t quite ready with their services. You know the consuming clients at a point to where they were held up, delayed in their delivery. So we watched their delivery cycles actually go from being in sprint, in lock step, in delivering you know with a, let’s say a three or four week cadence, three or four sprint cadence, it would bunch out. They’d wait ‘til the services team completed all their work, all the functional testing before they would start consuming the services and I looked at that and saw the inefficiencies of it. I kind of pulled the ROI together of getting a tool, started playing with all the various tools, open source tools, other big vendors, and it just turned out that this one worked best in our environment. The biggest savings we’ve had from it is by mocking out our third party calls. We don’t have those you know, the one cent, two cent per call hits anymore, bills coming back to us. We don’t have to worry about performance testing so we can mock it out with the service virtualization. And the biggest gain for me, that was cool but the biggest gain for me was actually having our internal customers be able to dev in sprint with the services team. We save so much time doing that.

We actually use VMware on an HP Blade platform. We looked at other hardware platforms, but we chose HP because of the way that they gave us the best price. Their customer support seems to be really well responsive when we call.

We were using IBM virtualization and Microsoft. We looked at quite a number of solutions and we ended up with the HPE product. Before we chose HPE, we had to do a proof of concept, and we liked what we saw.