Akimbi and its more established rival Surgient are addressing a need for software QA teams to test code on most or all the permutations of hardware and software configurations before releasing to production. Until a few months ago, this market did not exist.
In the past, software QA teams were at a loss when it came to exercising their code on enough hardware/software configurations to get an idea of how well their applications would work. Traditionally, IT organizations loaded a handful of representative system environments, while QWA teams prayed for the rest.
In the past few months, however, both Akimbi and Surgient have introduced software that takes advantage of VMware or Microsoft Hypervisor to help QA teams test on a wider variety of platform environments.
Surgient is arguably the older player of the two, having been in business in its current form since 2003. Providing a hosted service for running virtualized environments, it has recently introduced packaged software for companies that wish to image their virtual environments themselves. However, the company did not have an application for virtualizing testbed environments for QA teams until a few months ago.
By contrast, Akimbi is a brand new player that offers a pure packaged software tool. With its new OEM agreement with PlateSpin, Akimbi will embed the technology into its own tool. PlateSpin’s technology automates a critical bottleneck in the loading of system images from actual physical instances into virtual form. It automatically grabs the configuration from a physical instance and converts it to a VM image.
Until now, Akimbi’s beta customers could either transfer a virtual machine image from one machine to another, or manually reconstruct the image themselves. The PlateSpin technology considerably speeds up the process. Not surprisingly, this was by far the most requested capability that beta customers asked for while the company was still in stealth mode, according to Akimbi CEO James Phillips.
Besides having a head start, Surgient claims their advantage is that they offer a complete application that business users can tap out of the box. Surgient’s president and CEO, Bill Daniel, claims that one of their competitive advantages is the ability to conduct capacity planning to ensure that organizations have all the testbeds necessary to accommodate tests scheduled now and in the future. Not surprisingly, Akimbi claims such a capability is overkill.
There are other differences. Surgient is broader-based, but only recently added QA. Until now, Surgient’s primary business has been the hosting of virtual test demos for field representatives of software firms, or hosting of system images for internal IT training purposes.
Both companies would probably agree on one thing: the market is so young that their prime competition is do-it-yourself.
