Service-Oriented Virtualization (SOV) - a strategy of simulating the real-world behavior of software assets that comprise an SOA application, thereby decoupling development and testing teams from dependency on deployed Services and their underlying implementation layers - was unveiled this month at SOA World 2007 West by Shridhar Mittal, CEO of iTKO, Inc.

"By virtualizing the behavior of services with SOV," Mittal explained, "the extended development and test team can break the boundaries of limited access to live services and data - solving a primary stumbling block for SOA success."

While the practice of virtualizing hardware and testbeds has created significant IT cost benefits, Mittal's argument is that we are missing much of the potential value of virtualization as it applies to the SOA lifecycle.

He described how bringing the value of virtualization into the cycle of SOA application development requires a new approach of simulating the behavior of services through virtual services.

With the release of LISA 4, iTKO now offers a solution for creating and leveraging the virtual services needed for SOV practices, Mittal announced. 

"The iTKO LISA Virtual Services Environment (VSE) allows parallel development cycles for distributed SOA teams by both simulating services from a WSDL, and further, emulating the behavior of services and their underlying systems," he said. 

The company estimates to reduce the cost of software licensing, support and maintenance by 60-80 percent per additional team test environment.

"LISA VSE offers unmatched collaboration and agility for SOV," said Mittal. "By allowing the distributed development and testing teams to capture and model virtual services within LISA, we can speed the time-to-market and quality of delivered services, at a much lower cost."

LISA VSE allows the team to create or capture Virtual Services that basically look and act like standard WSDL-defined or other underlying Services (such as ESB, Java objects, databases, etc.) that SOA applications can connect to, the company stated in an announcement. 

These virtual services are actively running and implemented on an instance of the LISA Server instead of the implementation hardware, so they can be accessible for design, development and testing activities whenever, and wherever they are needed.

The next SOA World conference, SOA World Conference & Expo 2008 East, is being held in New York City, June 23-24, 2008.