iTKO LISA announced the general availability release of LISA 4.5. LISA 4.5 extends the functionality of the LISA 4 suite, adding service virtualization for load and performance testing, and customer-driven enhancements.

"We are exceptionally pleased with the adoption and innovative usage of LISA in our customer base. iTKO customers are tackling the hardest quality and integration challenges in the field, for LISA 4.5, we focused on customer-driven enhancements," said Shridhar Mittal, CEO of iTKO. "These enhancements deliver improved usability, integration platform support, and Service Virtualization capabilities for load and performance testing. We believe our customers will want to upgrade rapidly to achieve increased quality and agility throughout the lifecycle of their critical applications."

iTKO customers value the product for its unique ability to test both their existing EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) business processes, as well as emerging SOA initiatives. LISA's native interaction with leading enterprise integration platforms (e.g. TIBCO, Software AG/webMethods, SAP, IBM MQ, Sonic, Oracle, etc.) enables automated testing of complex business logic where traditional methods and tools have failed.

The combination of SOA and Virtualization techniques within enterprise IT has also increased exponentially over the last year, with companies adopting Virtualization in the data center to reduce the server costs of supporting SOA. The release of LISA VSE (Virtual Service Environment) as part of LISA 4 in September 2007 signaled the first solution for virtualizing the behaviors of complex services-based applications, to eliminate dependencies among teams throughout the application development lifecycle.

"In addition to providing a Virtual Service Environment for functional testing of the multiple components that make up SOA applications, we see the ability to complement existing load and performance labs and Test Lab Virtualization solutions as one of our greatest growth areas," said John Michelsen, Founder and Chief Scientist, iTKO. "Many of our customer teams have very limited access to the mainframes and business logic they depend on for testing and developing their own applications, and replication of the whole architecture is impossible by only using server virtualization. With LISA 4.5, these teams can virtualize the rest of the architecture, to 'shave off' the distributed dependencies, and ensure high service levels much earlier in the lifecycle."

New features and enhancements for LISA 4.5 include:

• Performance-ready LISA Virtual Services Environment (VSE)
• Native Integration Platform support increased
• Improved UI layer testing
• Usability and workflow enhancements

"The IT benefits of server consolidation and test lab virtualization using tools like VMware and Surgient are already proven and well-known," said Michelsen. "Now with LISA VSE, we are offering customers a way to expand on that value beyond the enterprise data center, to provide faster time-to-market and quality across the full lifecycle of developing, testing and maintaining highly interconnected services-based applications."