Major Testing giants – Takenover

This year saw  IT giants taking over major QA market leaders to strenghthen their SDLC offering. It started off when IBM decided to take over rational , HP took over Mercury Interactive and finally Borland took over Segue.

This has basically changed the outlook of testing as a whole. Automation in QA was a niche market but a fully independent segment.

Mercry Interactive were clear market leaders at the time, with a very robust product and a support portal which could make the most ordinary QA engineer feel like a pro. With a head start in the industry and competent set of engineers to back them, Mercury could set their own prices and standards and really thrived, making it hard for competition to make any inroads. I still believe that there is no one else close to Mercury interactive’s Loadrunner for performance engineering.

Other players like Segue and Rational came to the fore. Rational, with a corporate plan of selling their QA solutions along with their RUP process did well initially but were not able to stamp the authority on the products usage and could not build an ardent following of engineers who would fight for using rational in high value projects.

Segue on the other hand were clever enough to learn from Mercury’s short commings and built their product to be technically competent and quite a formidable opposition to mercury. But they lacked the funds to actually market their product against mercury who were pretty much well settled by then.

What do these take-overs mean for us? I believe the independent testing market segment will slowly vanish and testing products will become a part of one entire suite of products from HP, IBM, rational etc. What companies need to understand is that testing is very project specific and automation is always implemented after very thorough evaluations and proof of concepts. So for example, If one is going to standardise on HP’s SDLC offering, they could get stuck with a product that might not be suitable for that particlar project and such products usually land up on shelves.

For me,  It probably signals the end of an era, which was spent trying to put this segment and these products on the map in India and ensuring their success in the SDLC. These takeovers are the deliverables and I will be moving to other niche markets hoping to see more success!

~ by zombieanoop on October 9, 2006.