A New Year is around the corner, and with it the potential for a vast array of new technologies. 2014 was a year of rapid changes, and there is no sign of a slowdown ahead. Techwire recently talked to several technology leaders to ask them what they expect to see next and what they think is important for the industry and government in the upcoming year and beyond.
Jack Alexander, Director, State of California
CA Technologies, Public Sector vertical
2015 will be the year of service virtualization.
We are seeing some fundamental changes to the way that application projects are designed, developed and deployed. A new market segment came into being a few years back, and it’s starting to gain widespread adoption in the public sector, after proving itself out in private industry. I predict that this will really start gaining speed in government systems in 2015. We are going to look back in 10 years and wonder how applications were developed and tested prior to the commercialization of service virtualization, and 2015 will be the year where government started changing their approach.
The concept of service virtualization is new to many public sector CIOs and project directors, but they are coming to understand just how impactful it will be to their ability to bring application projects to completion. To understand the concept of service virtualization, think of creating wind tunnels for software, much like how airplanes are designed and tested, where components of the plane can be put into a wind tunnel to see how they will perform well before the airplane is taken for its first test flight.
Many major software vendors such as CA, IBM, and HP are making large investments in this area, as the sudden and dramatic adoption in the commercial markets have surprised many who thought that the era of innovation in the area of application testing was over long ago. As more and more projects are using this technical concept to reduce project risk, reduce develop times, and improve outcomes for their stakeholders, we will see nearly every application project begin to leverage service virtualization.
