Theresa Lanowitz on Ulitzer

Everyone wants to lower their capital expenditures and increase operational efficiency - it's a sign of the times. The economy of the past 12 - 18 months has forced all organizations to do more with less and become more efficient. While everyone can identify with the request to do more with less, they can also identify with the overwhelming need to deliver quality.

The need to deliver quality is an age-old adage and has many interpretations as to what "quality" actually means. This argument is likely to rage on in perpetuity at an academic level.

In practicality, testing organizations know first-hand what it is like to have staff reduced, compressed deadlines, added complexity, and shortened timeframes. Any testing organization, whether using automated tools or manual methods, knows the difficulty and expense of creating, maintaining, and monitoring a test lab. In these lean times, testing organizations are asked to deliver more, faster, and with more "quality".

Automating and managing a test lab with virtual lab technology is a way for the testing organization to deliver more, faster, and with greater quality. Virtual lab technology delivers an environment as close to production as possible for testers. Testing in a production-like environment that is rapidly provisioned and rapidly released upon completion of the testing eliminates the common dialog of "it works on my machine" that often comes between testers and developers. Testers simply send a URL to developers identifying the diagnosed defect. Developers are able to quickly reproduce the error and take the appropriate action. And, developers can still maintain their own development environment and not compromise their work environment.

If you are using automated testing tools from any vendor or if you are testing manually, check out what virtual lab technology can do for you.

Have You Reduced Your Capital Expenditures With Virtual Lab Technology?
Independent analyst firm, voke, is conducting a market study on virtual lab technology.  If you are using any virtual lab technology, provide us your opinion in this vendor neutral survey. Virtual lab technology includes:

• Citrix Essentials
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 Beta
• Surgient
• Skytap
• VMLogix LabManager
• VMware Lab Manager

Virtual lab technology is a powerful way to help organizations deliver more value. voke is curious to know what you think about virtual lab technology, what benefits you are achieving and what you think the future holds for the technology.

Take voke's market survey today and help shape the market.  Just click here: