Cloud computing brings a lot of opportunities for service providers that do software testing. There are many possible options to create work for the service providers. The cloud market is still in a very early stage and will continue to grow and evolve.

New possibilities infrastructure
As cloud computing evolves, it creates the global infrastructure for a new possibilities to be used in software quality assurance and testing. It gives our clients an option to use us as a specialized provider in the cloud, instead of trying to do everything themselves. It even generates a whole new greenfields market. Clients share public or hybrid clouds with each other or create private clouds to be shared within the whole company, instead of separate options for all different departments. Service providers can help these clients with the best advice on how they can integrate the cloud computing possibilities with testing.

According to Gartner 20% of the businesses in 2012 will have no IT assets. These businesses will use the cloud as an IT asset. These clouds need to be secure and readily available; it needs to be a commodity. Fellow IT researcher IDC expects the server revenue from the public cloud category will grow from €473 million in 2009 to €583 million in 2014. And server revenues generated as a result of the private cloud market is expected to grow from €5.9 billion to €9.6 billion within the same period. A growth of about 62 percent and significantly more than the 29 percent growth of the public cloud. In 2010 a growth of services and the Cloud subscription model, where you only pay for what you (re)use, are to be the key change factors.

Opportunities service providers
The many possible opportunities for software testing generated by cloud computing are as follows:

• Test environments in a private Cloud for test outsourcing projects;
• Test environments in a private or hybrid cloud at the client;
• Test environments in a hybrid Cloud, serviced by the service provider;
• Test environments in a public Cloud, serviced by service provider;
• Varieties on test levels (like performance testing from/to the cloud), and
• SaaS offers with tooling.

Virtualisation
All opportunities have a need for virtualisation (and standardization). When test environments are created in the cloud they need to be virtualised parts of that environment. This not only makes the implementation easier, but also the execution of the different instances in the cloud. The virtualised environments can be added or removed from the cloud when needed. Creating a flexible option to create test environments (including the needed configuration) whenever a test project starts.

Service providers needs to have an approach on how it can take a bite out of this possible revenue. It’s advised not to blindly jump on the cloud bandwagon, but to have a good approach. This can be different from client to client, and therefore we need to determine which types we are going to support that can help serve a wide range of clients.

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