ITKO is an enterprise software company based in Plano, Texas

Plano, Texas

Plano is a city in the state of Texas, located mostly within Collin County. The city's population was 259,841 at the 2010 census, making it the ninth-largest city in Texas and the 71st most populous city in the United States. Plano is located within the metropolitan area commonly referred to as...

. ITKO's LISA product suite is designed to improve the effectiveness of application development

Software development

Software development is the development of a software product...

 teams, especially those involved in custom applications, SOA

Service-oriented architecture

In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...

, and cloud computing

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

. ITKO became a CA Technologies company in 2011.

History

Company founders John Michelsen and Ruston Vickers were operating a custom software consulting company when they invented the test engine kernel of LISA 1.0 in 1999 to provide high-volume load testing of a Java-based trading network.

Since the first commercial release of LISA 2.0 in 2002, ITKO has increasingly focused on testing the many disparate types of components and technologies that can make up distributed, Internet-based enterprise applications.

Shridhar Mittal became president and CEO in September 2005.

The company's customers include American Airlines, ANZ, Citigroup, DirecTV, Oracle Corporation, Southern California Edison, and Time Warner Cable.

On June 29, 2011, CA Technologies announced that it would acquire ITKO for $330 million. In August, CA announced that the acquisition had been completed.

Products

The LISA suite includes the following products:

• LISA Virtualize: Eliminates dependencies on unavailable or inaccessible resources during the software development and testing phases. Uses the concept of service virtualization, which involves creating virtual models that simulate the behavior of the constrained resources.

• LISA Test: Provides an automated testing solution for distributed application architectures that leverage SOA, BPM, integration suites, and ESBs. Product teams can use LISA Test to design and execute automated unit, functional, regression, integration, load, and performance tests. They can test multiple layers of the distributed architecture, including Rich Internet Application UIs and heterogeneous middle-tier technologies.

• LISA Validate: Helps organizations to ensure that changes to individual services do not cause unintended consequences for business requirements and policies.

• LISA Pathfinder: Improves the ability of development and testing teams to identify and fix defects in complex, distributed systems.

External links

• ITKO Home Page
• ITKO LISA Soapbox blog
• Virtualization Journal article byline: "Are SOA and Virtualization Related?" March 2, 2008.
• SearchSOA article "SOA Virtualization Gets Real," Rich Seeley, November 28, 2007.