Recently, I was talking with the CEO of a medical transcription business.  One of the major challenges his company faces is common with many organizations large and small  -  he has had to turn down new deals and revenue because integration is not possible between his own IT systems and those of his potential clients (in this case, medical record systems).

I explained to this CEO how he can integrate with any medical records system using business process automation (BPA) tools from Automation Anywhere, which offer easy drag and drop application integration.

The CEO asked me “Any system?” When I said yes, he asked me again.

When this CEO saw Automation Anywhere in action, he called it a game changer. For him, deploying Automation Anywhere means he can grow his business by taking on new clients that just a few months ago he’d have to turn down.

Fortune 500 companies have long been using BPA solutions, spending millions of dollars to automate million dollar processes. In these large deployments, BPA inherently involves integrating 1 or more applications (yet these traditional BPA tools only support a handful of application adapters).

Automation Anywhere was a radical idea when we launched it. Our goal was to create a solution that cost 1/10^th of existing solutions; could deploy in 1/10^th the time and could integrate with any application or website.

We thought Automation Anywhere would be popular with small to mid sized company – and it has been. Smaller companies, who haven’t had access to solutions like ours, are still amazed at what this means for their business.  But we’ve also been amazed at how large companies have jumped on it just as fast.

As the CEO reminded me, Automation Anywhere  is a game changer.

As leading software development site SearchSoftwareQuality.com reported in January 2010, agile development was one of the big stories in 2009. Their October 2009 survey showed that although agile adoption continues to be on the rise, development organizations are gaining more experience with the agile methodology and are reaping benefits of process improvement and faster delivery times. Yet they still cite age-old problems such as resistance to change. SearchSoftwareQuality concludes: “And even as many organizations are just transitioning to agile, some industry observers say the next-generation of agile methodology is already emerging.”

At Testing Anywhere, we believe we provide one of the next-generation automated testing agile tools.

The short iteration cycles, the collaborative and cross functional processes of agile development create new challenges for automated testing software.

In this “Testing Anywhere and Agile Testing” slide deck, I go into more detail about these challenges and how Testing Anywhere is designed to overcome the challenges agile developers face every day.

Testing Anywhere creates new ways to collaborate, new ways to communicate across functions and more effective ways to document the testing processes. Three ways we do this:

-       Test to exe: Once you automate any test, Testing Anywhere can convert it to an exe, allowing you to run this test on any machine, anywhere. The exes are self-contained and can even run on computers that do not have Automation Anywhere. In Agile testing, speed is the key. Generate an exe, once QA finds a bug to give to development, allowing a quick turnaround.

-       Compatibility testing: Need to run a regression test on Firefox, IE, Opera, Camino, and Safari? No need to write five separate Scripts – with Testing Anywhere, you can “script once and test everywhere.”

-       Automated regression testing: Regression testing requires you to retest an application after code modification. This often requires hundreds, if not thousands, of new tests to retest the application, check and rectify, both the newly written code and its integration with the original application code. Testing Anywhere makes it easy for you to automate all of your regression testing – creating and managing test cases can be done in just hours. Unmatched ROI and cost savings have made this, the software of choice for thousands of users.

If you are agile software developer, check out free trial of Testing Anywhere and tell us what you think!

Since the launch of Testing Anywhere in December, we have been meeting with a significant number of resellers – large and small. The feedback has been quite positive as resellers see the value of Testing Anywhere’s new approach to automated web testing, automated software testing and other types of testing.

Our partner William Echlin of Traq Software summed it up this way:  “We have worked in the software testing space for years and understand the dynamics of selling high end products. In the short time we’ve been selling Testing Anywhere, we have found that it fits a unique role in the marketplace. Its sales and pricing strategy is perfect in this economic climate.”

As I said in our press release today, resellers in this economy are looking to sell products that provide new and exceptional value and also have a short sales cycle.  Testing Anywhere adds new complementary functionality to resellers who sell high end automated testing products as well as any resellers who want to sell easy to use testing software. Our products, sales, support and marketing programs are designed to make a faster, easier sale, our existing partners are already seeing traction.

The new Testing Anywhere Channel Partner program, aimed at solution partners, resellers and OEM partners, is designed to quickly increase revenues in a software testing space that generally involves a significant sales cycle and investment in product education.

There are 3 main benefits to channel partners interested in joining the Testing Anywhere channel program:

a. Testing Anywhere products are relatively low priced with many features not found in more expensive software such as HP QuickTest Pro. Early feedback from channel partners is that this is a great value to them in this current economy environment. While they cannot easily or quickly sell high priced test automation software, they are easily able to sell Testing Anywhere.

b. Testing Anywhere features intelligent automation technology and an innovative GUI design. Testers can use it with little or no training, which also results in a much shorter sales cycle.

c. Testing Anywhere’s sales people actively work with its channel partners in the sales process. Testing Anywhere helps provide leads and generate immediate revenue for our partners. Testing Anywhere partners are only required to give local presence and time.

If this sounds interesting to you, please join our partner program and tell us what you think!

We are half way through January and I can finally take a breath and reflect a bit. 2009 really ended with a bang for Automation Anywhere and 2010 shows no signs of slowing down.  I’d like to take a moment to say I’m quite proud of our team for all of their contributions. Due to our team’s tireless efforts Automation Anywhere was awarded the “Best IT Automation Product” Gold award for our Windows Automation Software and was featured in a Wall Street Journal article on management practices that have made Automation Anywhere a leader in business and IT automation.

Windows IT Pro wrote:

• “Automating the most time consuming and repetitive IT tasks can reap huge benefits for any harried IT professional. Automation Anywhere Enterprise isn’t the only IT automation product on the market, but it’s unarguably one of the best.” —Jeff James, editor in chief, Windows IT Pro
• “This best-of-breed solution lets you easily design and manage your automation task—without the necessity of programming knowledge.” —Jason Bovberg, senior editor, Windows IT Pro

Our pride cannot be described in words. Something we have known for years, our customers have been saying again and again, is now echoed by the #1 IT magazine. Automation Anywhere is best there is in IT automation. Period.

But we aren’t resting on our laurels. As Cari Tuna from the Wall Street Journal reported  – everyone at Automation Anywhere has great ideas and we are willing to put in the hours.

In addition to our continued commitment to Automation Anywhere, we also launched our newest product, Testing Anywhere, in December. This is a very big deal for us, our channel partners and pretty much anybody who cares about low cost, automated software testing.

Since our launch:

• Our channel program has caught the eye of several very important partners who recognize the disruptive nature of Testing Anywhere over more expensive archaic products such as HP QuickTest Pro
• We’ve had dozens of leading industry experts join our “Team Anywhere” program.

We’ll be announcing details of a new channel program for Testing Anywhere. Please contact us directly if you would like to talk with us before then.

Automation Anywhere is proud to announce our newest product, Testing Anywhere. Testing Anywhere is an automation testing solution that allows users to automate any type of testing.

Supported testing includes:

Automated Software Testing
Automated Web Testing
Distributed Load Testing
Regression Testing
Functional Testing
Black Box Testing
Acceptance Testing
Keyword-driven Testing
Unit Testing
Data-driven Testing
Smoke Testing
Integration Testing
Compatibility Testing
Performance Testing
System Testing

Testing Anywhere provides a number of key testing features including what we think is a game changer in the automated testing market and one of the biggest threats to HP QuickTest Pro ( QTP): “test to exe”.

1. Automated Testing – SMART test recorder, Web recorder, Windows Object Recorder, Editor, Image recognition

2. Automation Visualization – provides for a screenshot of every step of an automated process allowing for a storyboard view of an entire test and ability to capture images on-demand.

3. Integrated Collaboration – allows users to share test scripts and reports across multiple groups.

4. Advanced Reporting – includes comprehensive standard and custom reports including images for every test run and checkpoint.

5. Test to .EXE – Testing Anywhere’s game changer – allows for remote testing on any machine, anywhere as an executable file. No need to install any software on remote machines. No need to stress about testing parameters, recorders, file types. Etc.

The Offer – Get A Free License of Testing Anywhere

We believe that Testing Anywhere by Automation Anywhere is a market-changing product in the testing tools market space. However; as we have discovered with our market leading Automation Anywhere product line and our 25,000 current customers, user feedback is one of the most critical factors to our product success.

Join Team Anywhere to get a free license of Testing Anywhere. Team Anywhere is an elite group of professionals who provide real world expertise and opinions in the automated testing market. Membership is restricted to individuals who contribute opinions to the members of the community, provide feedback and technology ideas or can contribute substantially to the development of the automated testing market. Our rigorous screening process provides Team Anywhere members a serious platform to share, contribute and make a difference.

We live in a real-time on-demand Internet-based immediate-gratification world. Not only true today, this reality was made clear to us 6 years ago when we launched our company. At the time, we were a very young, small startup proud of our first product and ready to take on the world. As such, as CEO, I wanted to show our team how proud I was of our efforts by purchasing the first copy of our product online at our launch (okay, I also wanted to make sure everything worked…). Our office space looked like a television commercial spot as our small team gathered around my computer to watch me make that first purchase. There was only one problem, the world beat me to it. Or, more factually, a person in Australia had already purchased the first copy of our product. Automation Anywhere delivered.

What do we mean when we say “Automation Anywhere”? The promise of Automation Anywhere is to create intelligent software that automates any business or IT process or task. These processes or tasks can include:

• Business process automation
• Web data extraction
• Data integration/data automation
• IT automation
• Automated testing
• Application integration
• Job scheduling
• Batch processing
• GUI automation
• And much, much more

What are our goals for delivery of Automation Anywhere? We had a number of goals and client promises that we agreed to early on and still deliver today, these include:

• 1/10 the price, 1/10 the time. If it takes $250,000 to for business process automation, with AA it should take under $25,000 and if it takes 10 months for a project, it should happen under 1 month.

• Ease of Use – we want Automation Anywhere to be available to anyone (developer, QA, line of business manager, IT) this is not a technology that should be limited by one’s technical abilities

• Cost Effective – today’s economic climate notwithstanding, we design and deliver all of our solutions as cost effective components of organizational infrastructure

We felt calling our company Automation Anywhere was a bold statement and we want to be a bold company. Even 6 years later in today’s Internet-driven distributed computing environment, the promise of delivering automation anywhere to organizations of all sizes is a daunting task. But, we’ve been doing it to the tune of 25,000 customers in more than 90 countries.
Finally, stay tuned, our next blog will feature some big news. Based on our customer feedback, we’ve picked one of the tasks from the list above to receive some special attention – we’ll be launching an exciting new product with an exciting new offer. If you have ever used HP QTP (aka HP QuickTest Pro) this news will definitely be of interest.