Automated Software Testing Comes Of Age
Mercury Interactive held the lion's share with 45 per cent of the overall automated software testing market, followed by companies such as Autotester (9.2 per cent), Seque (9.2 per cent) and Software Quality Automation (8 per cent).
Softbridge trailed with a 7.3 per cent share of the market, while a range of other niche automated software testing tools developers shared the remaining 21 per cent slice of the market.Mercury clinched sales of $US23.5 million ($31.3 million) last year, up 31 per cent over the previous year and was aiming for global sales of $US44 million this year.
Mr Azulay and Montrose's director of sales and marketing, Mr Alon Farhy, said 10 per cent of this year's sales would come from the AsiaPacific, chiefly Japan and Australia. Mercury Interactive has brought two new products to the local automated software testing market - Testsuite, a full range of testing tools for client/server networks and SQL Inspector, an application that pinpoints specific software bugs in networks as well as testing client/server communication problems.Mr Azulay, who is one of the five co-founders of Mercury Interactive's operations in Israel, said a company chief executive's worst nightmare these days was a network crash.
"Software problems that cause a whole company's operations to shut down can turn quickly into multimillion dollar disasters," Mr Azulay said. "Boardrooms are becoming more educated about this but many have had to learn the lesson the hardest way of all." He said others were still flouting software conventional wisdom, believing network crashes would not occur on their patch. Mr Azulay is adept at recounting an impressive litany of well documented software quality disasters that have cost Israeli, European and US corporations millions, as well as damaging reputations. Two years ago the Bank of New York was forced to borrow $US23.6 billion overnight from the Federal Reserve and as a result paid $US5 million interest on the loan. But the bank need not have taken out the emergency loan. A software bug in its networks had incorrectly shown the deficit. However, the bank still had to pay out the $US5 million interest, Mr Azulay said. Four years ago a phone service in the Washington DC area had to shut down for a day when the entire telephone system crashed. The crash was apparently caused by an error in just one line of code when the telecoms provider was adjusting to a new service.
Network Testing Software
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