Aberdeen Releases Research Report on SOA Governance Progress.

iTKO Co-Sponsors Fact-Based Survey Measuring Value of Services-Based Software, Available at http://www.itko.com/site/resources/optimizedsoa.jsp

DALLAS -- iTKO, Inc., a provider of complete automated testing solutions for SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) software, today announced the availability of an Aberdeen Group Research report titled, "Management and Governance: Planning for an Optimized SOA Application Lifecycle." The research finds that a lack of governance within IT organizations is the chief roadblock to managing an effective SOA strategy. iTKO co-sponsored the research by Aberdeen, a Harte-Hanks Company.

Initial findings of the survey found that:

* Companies that employ SOA-specific operations automation, and related governance software for automation earlier in the adoption process, consistently achieve much higher value from their SOA investments;

* About 40 percent of leading or best-in-class organizations have earned paybacks of more than $1 Million on their SOA investments, compared with 14 percent of the entire survey pool. These companies tend to monitor their application development lifecycles more closely than typical enterprises.

* Web Services (SOAP/WSDL) enablement alone accounted for less than half of the primary deployment strategies of best-in-class companies.

Lifecycle Quality is a key aspect of SOA Governance, and SOA Testing is important at every stage of adoption to ensure that the resulting services, and their underlying implementation layers, can be trusted for business purposes. At design time, build time and runtime, every layer of distributed SOA architectures must be tested thoroughly. Without visibility into -- and enforcement of -- the structural integrity, behaviors and performance of the entire system, businesses cannot reap the expected reuse, cost and business agility benefits.

"SOA Governance must provide a level of trust to accompany the constant integration inherent in SOA architectures," said Jim Mackay, chief marketing officer, iTKO, Inc. "Businesses applying SOA Lifecycle Quality earlier in their SOA governance strategy can avoid risk, and gain the most return on their investments in SOA applications. It is vitally important to educate people on the true value of achieving trust as early as possible. Aberdeen's research on this topic serves as a wake-up call to companies that start deploying services without fully thinking through their SOA strategy."

"Too many organizations are trying to scale SOA operations and development using obsolete technology and processes," said Peter S. Kastner, Aberdeen's vice president for enterprise integration research, and the report's author. "But we found that the companies that come out ahead in managing and governing their SOAs succeed by investing in the right technology tools and realigning their organizational structures and processes -- governance -- to accommodate this significant sea change in corporate computing."

The research, based on a survey of more than 950 organizations worldwide and spanning multiple industries, shows readers in-depth survey results and how to best implement a successful SOA strategy. This report is valued at US$399; however, for a limited time a complimentary copy of the report, underwritten by iTKO, is available by following this link: http://www.itko.com/site/resources/optimizedsoa.jsp.

The iTKO LISA suite of products offer the world's most comprehensive testing solution for Service-Oriented Architectures. Unlike conventional UI- and code-oriented testing tools, LISA was built from the ground up to test the many heterogeneous components, and the workflows, that make up SOA software.

About iTKO

iTKO, Inc. offers the most complete software framework for testing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, allowing multiple business technology layers to be exercised within a single test case. iTKO's mission is to allow everyone involved in IT to own Complete, Collaborative, and Continuous[TM] software quality, from development, to QA and business analysts. iTKO LISA Complete SOA Testing Framework performs unit, functional, regression, load and performance tests, without requiring test coding or script maintenance, saving up to 80% of the cost of testing over the course of six months. For dynamic web applications, web services, J2EE, .NET, Java objects, JMS/messaging, databases, and many more technologies, LISA provides live interaction with every layer, and gives everyone the "Freedom-to-Test" applications exactly as they will be deployed. Founded in 1999, the Dallas-based company's customers include Sun, Citi, Capgemini, AMD, TIBCO and i2.

http://www.itko.com