DEJ’s research shows that organizations going through digital transformation are changing how they are evaluating technologies. Instead of looking into individual features and functionalities, they are more interested in how the technologies’ value propositions fit into their key transformation goals.
The research also shows that application performance development and testing (APDT) solutions meet most of these goals, but in many cases it is difficult to translate the capabilities into key items on digital transformation agendas. Additionally, we are seeing a lot of innovation in this space and some new capabilities are designed to helping organizations become full-scale digital enterprises.
DEJ identified five digital transformation goals where these solutions are having a strong impact.
1- Making business more predictable
Organizations are looking to be prepared not only for changes in market preferences in the terms of products, but also how to keep – or improve – their competitive position and better serve their customers. Load testing and capabilities for impact analysis of functionality changes and usage patterns enable these organizations to be prepared for changes in their internal and external environments. Some, however, advanced analytic functionalities such as “what-if” and trending analysis allow them to go even step further and ensure that they can successively project future success of their businesses
2 – Adoption and management of new technologies.
DEJ’s research shows that many leaders in digital transformation are taking a shift from the traditional approach where technology is just an enabler of a general -business strategy. Instead, they are building new technology-centric business models. ADPT solutions play an integral role in this approach as many of them are providing capabilities for mobile testing while others are offering solutions for emulating cloud conditions or leveraging cloud operating systems as a testing platform. That reduces the cost of internal testing infrastructure and ensures that their applications are cloud-ready. It also allows them to seamlessly leverage hybrid cloud environments without any negative impact on performance.
Additionally, 33% of organizations in DEJ’s recent survey on IT Performance Monitoring reported they are deploying, or looking to deploy, microservices. That provides flexibility benefits, but also creates challenges in the testing and management processes. More ADPT vendors are starting to offer innovative solutions to address this issue which can further benefit these organizations
3 – New markets and revenue streams
Forty-eight percent of organizations reported that creating new revenue streams is the key reason for digital transformation. In many cases that means entering new markets geographically both from the customers’ and employees’ perspectives. Many ADPT vendors have developed very scalable capabilities where they can support hundreds of thousands of users around the word. Also, providers of synthetic testing solutions are constantly increasing their networks of points of presence (POPs) so they can truly test performance on a global level. Additionally, many organizations are increasingly including APIs in their strategies to create revenue and some vendors are offering strong capabilities for testing the performance of these technologies.
4 – DevOps
Fifty-nine percent of organizations reported that operations are lagging behind developers when it comes to launching new services while 41% reported that DevOps is one of the most critical IT initiatives. Some ADPT solutions are introducing innovative solutions to deal with these challenges such as platforms for collaboration, alerting and maintaining records as well as centralized repositories for DevOps data.
5 – Business impact
There are various areas where organizations can benefit from these solutions and, other than the obvious one which to create new revenue and generate services that perform well in production. Some of the others include improving time to market, achieving agility and Continuous Delivery, reducing cost and making educated decisions about resource allocation. Some ADTP solutions provide strong automation capabilities that significantly reduce cost and time needed for testing while also simplifying the process. Additionally, selected vendors provide capabilities that allow organizations to understand how the effectiveness of their testing efforts impacts some of the key business metrics such as revenue generation, customer satisfaction and engagement and brand recognition.
There are many capabilities in ADTP solutions that can help chief digital officers (CDO) and business leaders to achieve key goals for digital transformation and most of them are described above. However, if these solutions will be truly effective in digital economy depends on three key themes – correlation, analytics and automation. There needs to be a correlation between different teams, data sets, testing results and user experience – even testing data between different containers. Also, there needs to be automation of the testing process as well as request and release workflows.
And finally, analytics are becoming the key competency of this market and cuts across each of the five areas mentioned above. Solutions that can make the most progress in these three areas have a major opportunity to truly differentiate themselves.