Software: You just build and put it out to the world, right? Not quite, there’s a whole heap of testing involved, and there is gold to be made there.
Software testing has always been “a thing.” It has always been necessary to test the various aspects of the software solutions that enterprises create before putting them out in the wild.
But the thing that has changed is that software is now incredibly more pervasive than it has ever been before. There are orders of magnitude more software solutions than at any time in the past. Add to that the fact that the complexity of software is always increasing, and you have a real challenge from the perspective of testing.
So, it should come as no surprise to see an increasing number of tools and solutions that aim to solve the testing issue—from crowd-sourcing platforms that allow the “wisdom of the masses” to help worth an organization’s testing process to platforms that offer to “automate” all or part of the testing process.
Big money in testing software market
And there is serious money to be made here, as a funding round announced from Tricentis today indicates. Given that the market for testing software is predicted to reach $34 billion in 2017, funding should come as no huge surprise.
Tricentis calls itself the continuous testing company. That means Tricentis produces testing tools with which enterprises can increase their testing speed. Tricentis claims the ability to achieve testing automation over 90 percent—if you’re an organization with a largely manual testing process, that is a huge saving in time and, therefore, money.
Tricentis claims 400 customers, including such Top 500 brands as ExxonMobil, HBO, Whole Foods, Toyota, Allianz, BMW, Starbucks, Deutsche Bank, Lexmark, Orange, A&E, Vantiv, Vodafone, Telstra and UBS. The company has offices in Austria, Australia, Germany, India, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Anyway, Tricentis must be doing something right, since it received a monster $165 million Series B round from Insight Venture Partners. The funding comes after an awesome year of validation for the company—both Gartner and Forrester called out Tricentis as a “vendor to watch.” Customers seem to be raving about the Tricentis product suite as well. Sujit Unni, vice president of IT at Vantiv, says:
“We are constantly iterating and improving the business applications that are critical for supporting customers and employees. However, prior manual testing processes were inefficient and tedious. With the Tricentis Tosca, quality assurance now happens continuously—without scripting, without programming. Our manual testers have become automation specialists. As a result, we’ve significantly expedited and scaled testing across the business.”
My POV
This is a highly competitive sector, but one with huge addressable market. Tricentis is a privately held company, so we don’t have visibility into its revenue. Something tells me, however, that given the funding size, the company is slurping in revenue in copious quantities.
