Corio Inc., which develops hosted application management and infrastructure services software, is working on an offering that will let companies rent testing infrastructure software.
Due next week, the Corio Testing service lets users rent on a pay-as-you-go basis the sandbox testing and simulation infrastructure used in ERP (enterprise resource planning) implementations and upgrades for functional and performance testing. Corios service uses automated testing software and enables regression testing, officials said.
For a fixed fee, users are supplied with upfront design, development and configuration of testing scripts, which can be available on a per-script basis. Corio Testing also includes licenses for using automated testing software, including Mercury Interactive Corp.s WinRunner, QuickTest Pro or LoadRunner.
In addition, the service includes the option to rerun testing scripts on demand and provides the foundation for a quality assurance testing architecture, officials said.
Corio Testing operates in two phases. During the development phase, users can order, on an on-demand basis, the infrastructure necessary to complete a project—be that building a new system or a new instance, according to John Ottman, executive vice president at Corio, in San Carlos, Calif. This phase includes testing an environment for performance and tuning.
Phase 2 enables users to do stress testing and simulation for load endurance on applications.
For Jeff Besecker, manager of applications support services at Southern Union Co., a pay-as-you-go testing service is a welcome retreat from business as usual. Besecker hosts his companys Oracle Corp. E-Business Suite through Corio.
When he needed to add more users to the system, he essentially rented Corios LoadRunner component to simulate load on the applications.
“Normally, we would have had to purchase [the testing infrastructure] and run it in-house,” said Besecker in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. “As part of the service, Corio was able to provide expertise, infrastructure and manage all the licensing of the appropriate components of testing, whereas we would have had to bring people in-house, train them and get up to speed before we would have [been able] to use the environment.”