Worldwide Cloud Testing and ASQ Software as a Service 2011-2015 Forecast and 2010 Vendor Shares: Testing Emerges from and for the Cloud to Drive Business Agility

This IDC study provides a 2011-2015 forecast and 2010 vendor share analysis for the worldwide cloud testing and automated software quality software-as-a-service (ASQ SaaS) market, which experienced 27.2% growth, up from 18.1% growth in 2009.

As companies reinvest in the context of ongoing economic volatility, the ASQ SaaS and cloud testing market is slated for a very strong overall trajectory of growth over the forecast period. This growth results from a variety of factors including demand for dynamic provisioning, the challenges of staffing cuts, and the need to manage quality with complex sourcing for application development projects, regulatory compliance, increased complexity of emerging development paradigms, and adoption of software-as-a-service licensing as organizations move toward cloud testing. As the largest vendors in the ASQ space have announced and delivered offerings in this market in 2010 and 1H11 and with strong early user adoption already, IDC expects a huge CAGR (on low initial base revenue) of 33.1% for 2010-2015, resulting in projected 2015 revenue of $1.0 billion. At the same time, vendors must address user concerns about reliability, scalability, performance, and SLA management as cloud testing offerings emerge.

"In the face of a volatile global economy, reinvestment but constrained IT staffing, and complex sourcing, demand is emerging strongly for SaaS ASQ and cloud testing solutions and will continue to do so throughout the forecast period, driven by customer demand for innovative cloud delivery models for quality and offerings from both small third-party providers and larger vendors," says Melinda Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management at IDC. "As we continue to see challenging global competitive and economic pressures, diverse deployment demand and innovation are driving higher comfort levels with SaaS and cloud approaches for testing. These enable rapid access to both quality solutions and support infrastructure to sustain complex software sourcing and distributed development environments. SaaS and cloud testing require fewer resources and decapitalized expenditures and low initial cost compared with on-premise ASQ solutions and facilitate faster quality approaches. Smaller vendors will continue to play a role for market innovation, as we see from emerging SaaS and early 'cloud' testing solutions. We expect ongoing acquisitions in this space, particularly in the 2011-2013 time frame."