The monitoring feature is not impressive because they use Windows for so much monitoring. They set a lock on the window, and then we have to gather the information from the main monitoring feature in the Windows server. There is not enough capacity for problem solving performance issues.

A lot of technology, a lot of Microsoft services, a lot of support to the functionality aspect of it - they need to mature a lot.

They need to catch-up, as for about four years they did not invest a lot of money on newer toolsets, adapting newer technologies, etc. There have been a bunch of companies that evolved during that time, like CA products and the Parasoft suite of products. These guys have already matured, so now HP is trying to play catch-up. They need to mature and move forward. The technology is always evolving, so they need to move towards that.

I think the place where this product has room for improvement is the protocol. The current protocol list needs to be updated to have much more coverage on technology. And the ability to implement customization within the tools. Currently, there is some limitation on the flexibility of the data logic as well as the configuration of portals and other things. So the protocol update is one thing and another is the ability to have more flexibility for customizations.

The awareness of Service Virtualization needs to be improved. People still have doubts about having a virtual asset over a physical environment. They want to know if they are going to behave differently, or in a similar way.

They want to know if they are running everything through Service Virtualization if there will be some sort of compliance issue.

I see that it is the simulation of an actual environment, and that the compliance issue can be addressed. Most products are not provided with detailed information, and that creates a lot of hesitation in the market about whether they should adopt it or not.

If it is adopted, they need to know whether or not they're going to get a similar result to what they see in a physical environment.

They need to know if they have to educate their staff and if are they able to be educated prior to implementation for the amount of CapEx invested.

HPE products are good, but they never make a product for a specific use. They make a product for the enterprise because that is their vision. They like multi-generational business plans. That means that they don't deliver small bits and pieces, but rather, they deliver to the enterprise.

When you talk about a complex domain like Service Virtualization, and when you talk about delivering such a wide landscape product, it has to go through lot of improvement cycles.

They are doing it. They are putting forth hard effort. They are putting in dollars, manpower, and they are hiring good techs. We respect that and hopefully they will arrive to the point where they will be able to compete in the market and become one of the dominant leaders, or THE dominant leader for Service Virtualization.

When you have business potential, why not spend money on R&D? Anybody will spend, and rather than being led by their CEO, R&D is being led by their customers who are thinking in the same direction.

The protocol maturity, the technology maturity, is about to come. The Service Virtualization is the first case, and it is not marketed well by any of the vendors. It should have a very strategic view. That is also missing.

The most important thing is that more and more customers need to be involved in lunch and learn sessions where get they can get feedback so the program is not run by product companies.

If you really go to the networking, infra, and other ADM spaces, you have a bunch of them running it, but not in this particular space.

I had to think about that a bit about what additional features I’d like in service virtualization quite a lot while here, especially when the solution architects are saying hey, we know you. Improvements, more like enhancements, with the rest API would be one. I think another thing I would rather see them implement is better use for their data driven model. Right now they’re using excel spreadsheets. I would like to see them implement a database instead of excel spreadsheets ‘cause sometimes you open excel spreadsheet that the data driven model built and it’s like 200 sheets big, it’s unmanageable. But the SQL server implementation that they provide now is through the-through the scripted roles and C#, and that’s not gonna be great for non-C# developers or JavaScript or you know, something at that point. They need to make it as part of the core tool.

One of the key components of the tool for us is the ability to write scripted rules in JavaScript or C#. As it stands now, the debugging capacity within the tool is fairly limited. I think some formal integration with an external ID that measures videotaping, like eClerx, would be nice in a future release.

The data-driven model is painful at best. The usage of Excel can be cumbersome for larger services being virtualized. Having an SQL-based implementation would be far more usable. Also, the requirement of an SQL Server database for each individual user of the Designer tool is overkill. A shared schema would be better.

As a design partner, our company has been working closely with HPE SV R&D and identified a number of improvements and enhancement recommendations that have been incorporated into HP SV releases.

The latest release of Service Virtualization had a great improvement to the management interface. However, there are still a few things missing.

For example, it's missing a feature to view multiple pages of the different projects that have virtualized services. It still requires us to go only one page at a time, and sometimes we virtualize thousands of services. So there should be a feature to allow a choice to view 20 or 50 projects at a time.

Another missing feature is the ability to select all or turn off all listed projects simultaneously. Right now, if we want to see just one project, we have to uncheck the boxes for 19 of them. Being able to "turn off all" or "turn on 1" would be a nice feature.

Finally, we initially only had the need to be able to do SOAP and REST services as well as some JBBC databases. However, we now need support for some Oracle products, which the solution doesn't have right now. HP added support for SAP recently, and we'd like to see the same for Oracle.

HP should work on providing better scripting support and include more communication and transport protocols. HP doesn't support many standard communication and transport protocol like Swift, FIX, EDI, MICS etc. Also the scripting functionality is in beta testing and not completely released so it may break at any time.

1. HP SV tool currently doesn’t support integration with Test Data Management tools which are used to simulate large volume of realistic data using various techniques. By integrating virtualization with TDM, testing penetration will be more.
2. HP SV currently supports response data to be stored only in Excel sheets but the support should be extended to store the response data in an external database so that maintenance will be much easier.

Some features which have been added in a later version are 

• Support for integration with TDM tools for more test coverage and to mimic production like data setup.
• Support for database connectivity for storing external data and using it in virtual service responses.
• Support for creating custom agents that allow developers to virtualize custom protocols like FIX, Swift, Copybook.
• Handling of multiple responses for messaging protocols like JMS, IBM MQ.

With service virtualization, I'd love to see support for the Internet of things. I would love to see a web portal that the developers can use without consuming the virtual service designer license. This portal would be a lightweight utility where developers can put their own request response parameters for an already-created virtual service. This would really help in the DevOps culture.

More support for different protocols. I would love to see more wizards rather than relying on some custom coding, which you can use C# as well as Visual Basic scripting. In the service virtualization platform, I would love to see more wizard features as well as the ability to connect to an external database, which by the way, we have put an enhancement request in for. I'd love to see that in the service virtualization platform.

Our next project is to move to the Cloud where a lot of the services will have to be re-learned with more innovation. It's got to be more scalable, but we won't be scaling it ourselves. It'll be more user defined. There won't be as many silos as there are now. It looks like some of the stuff being introduced at the show [Discover 16] will help us augment that, I'm waiting to learn more.

Other solutions have more functionalities.

There were minor version compatibility issues between HPSV project files while importing to the workspace, but these have already been addressed in recent versions. And same with stability.

Pricing is always a concern for our clients, so my guess is if anything can be beat it's price. It's knocking the price down to compete with the white-box vendors out there. If we were able to compete in any other area it would to compete in that space.

The integration with other solutions, such as ALM and Jira, should be improved.

I think the biggest issues that I've seen, and this is a personal view of mine, is that most of the HPE products have a common look and feel to them. I'd really like to see it be a little more customizable to a use and user standpoint. For example. I happen to be colors blind, so I'd like to see more vivid colors on the UI, and things like that. It would make it a little more flexible from the customer standpoint.

So far it's okay. I would like them to reduce the cost of the licenses.

• The developers area
• Performance testers