ITWire

Trevor Bunker, senior vice president of CA Technologies, who made the claims during CA Expo today, did not say whether the bank in question was ANZ or NAB, but claimed that it was already half way through testing 1,200 new applications to be deployed across Australia, Asia and New Zealand.  CA bought ITKO a year ago and inherited clients at all four major banks as well as Telstra.

Mr Bunker said that previously the bank had 600 people working on quality assurance and testing of the 1200 applications across 200 different test environments, but had still struggled to properly test all its applications. The ITKO Lisa platform allows operating environments to be mapped and simulated, permitting cheaper, and theoretically more comprehensive testing.

The bank’s testing challenge will be common to many large enterprises. According to Bill McMurray, managing director of CA Technologies Australia, the company’s clients have all reported that their IT budgets this year were “flat or going down but business innovation is expected to continue.”

It points to a “perfect storm in IT” according to Bill McCracken, chief executive officer of CA Technologies, who is currently visiting Australia.

Mr McCracken, who joined the IT industry in 1965, said that IT was now changing the way people lived and the way business operated. From an IT perspective he said it meant a rethink, away from IT being just a service organisation, and toward being a more central element of government and business.

Also speaking at CA Expo, a four-city series of events which kicked off in Sydney today, Mr McCracken said that during his 47 years in the industry the pace of development had soared. Where a business application once took 12-18 months to develop and launch, today it was not uncommon for new systems to be launched every 12-18 days.

However he noted that the complexity of modern IT environments meant that IT organisations needed to understand how applications that they developed might impact the broader IT ecosystem.  Mr McCracken said that CA’s ITKO subsidiary allowed companies to build simulations of their existing operations, and then test new software against that simulation to reduce risk.

Mr McCracken said he had rung the CEO of Nasdaq, Robert Greifeld, to tell him about ITKO in the wake of the Facebook IPO debacle. In that case Facebook’s listing was affected by trading glitches, when the systems developed to handle high volumes of trading failed to cope with unanticipated levels of cancellations.

“Trading was interrupted …hundreds of millions of dollars may have been lost,” said Mr McCracken. He said that a general purpose simulator such as ITKO’s platform could have provided more robust testing of the Nasdaq systems.