Dallas-based iTKO Inc. was founded in 1999 with the notion that the testing and QA needed to change with modern applications/services and the company's willingness to innovate moved it to the top slot in a competitive service performance category.

LISA is a no-code testing and virtualization environment that plugs into every phase of the service development lifecycle from unit, functional, regression and load testing, to virtualization of services, and continuous validation at build and runtime. It provides complete testing of business workflows across every heterogeneous technology layer of SOA applications, at both a service component and system-wide level.

Judges gave iTKO high marks for SOA enablement.

"These folks really understand service orientation," wrote one judge. "SOA is something they do natively. More users ought to start taking advantage of products like this because not nearly enough services are being put through a proper quality process."

LISA allows for high-volume testing and metrics collection of performance data against individual components and services, servers and workflows during design and development, during integration, and in deployment, leveraging the existing suite of LISA functional tests.

The virtual services environment was the big change in the product that shipped September 2007. When designing the test harness that surrounds a component under development, the ability to capture and simulate a virtual service environment of the rest of the service-oriented architecture inside LISA can save up to 80% of the labor and licensing cost of provisioning and maintaining a separate test environment. The product also allows for the testing of 3rd party services.

A typical small configuration of five named user LISA licenses, with a 250 virtual user LISA Server for SOA load and performance testing would average about $45,000. Volume discount and enterprise-wide implementation pricing are available.