iTKO says HP is going to resell its LISA Virtualize software combined with HP's quality management, functional and performance testing solutions.

It's supposed to accelerate software testing and reduce the cost of developing increasingly complex modern applications.

What LISA does is described as application behavior and performance virtualization.

The widgetry creates on-demand 24/7 virtual test environments.

It's supposed to lower test lab costs by up to 65% and shorten software release cycles by up to 38% by eliminating the testing constraints caused by dependent IT resources that are unavailable or inaccessible for testing.

iTKO says that for software test labs and test teams to be productive, they need live working environments to test against and those dependencies can become a huge constraint when critical systems like mainframes and cloud services are either unavailable or too costly to test against, or impossible to replicate using more hardware.

LISA Virtualize eliminates those dependency constraints by "virtualizing," or capturing and modeling, the target system's dynamic behavior and performance so it reacts and responds like the real production environment. LISA reportedly creates these virtual models automatically in just a few hours, and once they're created you don't need the live system anymore.

The LISA product suite is optimized for distributed multi-tier applications that leverage SOA, BPM, cloud computing, integration suites and ESBs.

The biggest benefits are reportedly seen when the applications are highly complex and subject to frequent change, which makes it appealing to folks in the midst of M&A, restructuring and business model changes.

iTKO and HP are initially targeting sales in North America with other geographies to follow. The deal was quietly signed in June and the pair is reportedly already chasing down enterprise leads, particularly among HP accounts.

HP is the market share leader in the software quality management space.

iTKO customers include eBay, American Airlines, Time Warner, Swiss Re, Level3, Bank of America and the US Defense Department.