Leadership Insight: Sandeep Johri on Tricentis’ Plan to Become a One-Stop Shop for Continuous Testing

Last week, software testing specialist Tricentis held its annual Accelerate Conference in Vienna, where attendees could find out more about the company’s product roadmap, as well as innovations in areas including RPA, AI, its new load testing offer and more. The company is emphasising its commitment to become a full-service provider of continuous testing across industry sectors. CEO Sandeep Johri spoke to QA Financial about recent moves in this area, including the progress of acquisitions like Flood IO, QA Symphony and Q-up. QA Financial: Where do you see Tricentis’ place within the current competitive landscape? Micro Focus [which bought out HPE’s software assets in 2017] was the incumbent and we address the need to replace their ageing infrastructure in many of our financial accounts. They are also the ones we’ll end up displacing most of the time, because their software is ageing. But they are probably the only ones who can claim as broad a coverage as us. Within the financial space, Micro Focus’ enterprise testing division, which used to be a part of HPE and before that Mercury Interactive, has historically been the leader. Following HP’s 2006 acquisition of Mercury, HPE held about 60-70% of the enterprise testing market, by my estimation. There are a few other companies we compete with, of course. We were concerned about CA Technologies coming into the space, but that has changed since they got acquired by chipmaker Broadcom. This is primarily because CA has announced that they will be selling off all of their non-mainframe products, which creates uncertainty about the product roadmap. There are also other, fast-growing, specialised companies like SmartBear, Eggplant and Applitools, but none of them are our direct competitors, but rather offer complementary solutions. Other players like Ranorex also offer automation, but tend to focus on smaller enterprises, rather than exclusively the large enterprise. So we believe we’re uniquely positioned in this space. QA Financial: Considering the consolidation going on in the market, are you looking at further acquisitions to boost the Tricentis platform? In terms of capabilities, we think we have most of what we need. We’re always on the lookout for innovative companies that have something we could use, but at the moment we have our hands full with  [recent acquisitions], Q-up, Flood.io and QASymphony. In particular, we are looking at integrating QASymphony’s qTest into the Tricentis portfolio. QA Financial: How is the QA Symphony merger progressing and where are those integrations first going to happen? The merger is not legally final, but it has been approved. We have had a number of customers express interest in QASymphony and, likewise, several QASymphony customers have taken an interest in test automation with Tricentis. We try to be careful in promoting cross-selling before the merger completes, but we have had 40-60 customers express an interest in cross-sell opportunities at this point. Going forward, we will offer an integrated solution through a single platform. The initial integration will be at the data layer, but we are looking to integrate QASymphony test managemenent into Tricentis’ platform. In fact, we think the QASymphony integration will be very fitting. Even though at first glance it seems like Tosca is one monolithic platform, it’s actually a collection of tools, linked together by a common framework. So the first step will be to take QASymphony’s qTest and use the same data governance framework, so we can start exchanging data between Tosca and qTest. Over time, we’ll also merge the user interfaces, so it all feels like a single platform. QA Financial: Where do you place financial services clients within your portfolio? We don’t target them specifically, but purely due to the size of their spending, banking, financial services and insurance firms account for around 51% of our revenue. In addition to financial organisations, we are also strong in insurance, where we count eight of the top global insurance providers among our customers – Allianz, Swiss Re, Vienna Insurance Group, Australia Insurance Group, ProInsurance, Century Insurance, Metlife and others. QA Financial: What’s your view on open-source and do you tend to compete with open-source tools? Various open-source solutions provide very good point solutions for specific testing challenges. There is no doubt that Selenium, as a script-based technology, has become popular with DevTest teams who are testing the UI at the browser level. However, most Global 2000 organizations have significantly more complex architectures and require a more comprehensive approach for end-to-end testing. Our approach is to make these open source tools more productive by providing a Continuous Testing platform that allows organisations to derive more value from open-source—stabilising open-source tests and making them more productive. Therefore, we have embraced open-source. We support projects like Selenium, SoapUI for functional testing and Appium for mobile and have integrated support for these tools into Tosca. We were running into financial services businesses, within which pockets of teams were happy using open-source tools. However, open-source tools by their very nature are very narrowly focused, and enterprises have broader testing needs. So what we’ve done is embraced the use of open-source tools alongside and in complement to our offer. Additionally, open-source tools demand high technical abilities. If you’re a highly technically skilled person, they allow you a high degree of control, but Tosca is much more user-friendly – think Windows versus Linux. QA Financial: Do you think there’s a perception in the market that you are primarily a SAP testing provider? A few years ago, we used to get criticised for not providing enough SAP testing. Over the past couple of years, we have focused on investing in SAP and dedicating significant R & D to our SAP testing solutions. However, we are just as strong in core banking and not just SAP core banking. For example, Finacle uses us for their own internal testing and for their customer testing. We also support [core banking software by] Avaloq, Temenos and Misys, among others.