Reducing Testing Tools cost

One major cost that makes most Testing managers wince in the high cost of Enterprise Testing tools. Although these tools provide great benefit, in terms of using automation to simulate dozens or even hundreds of users, these state of the art tools can cost anywhere from 10-24K per tester for a full suite of tools from any particular leading vendor.
There will also be additional annual maintenance support fees in the 15-30% of list price per year. That can easily add up to a recurring cost of 500-8K per year, for each individual tester, plus the depreciated cost of the tools themselves. (not to mention managing different licensing schemes of concurrent user, per server, per named user, etc etc.) For those clients that have adequate licenses, we always recommend transfering them to our OSTF to eliminate the tools cost. For those clients who wish to avoid the expensive cost of tools that are not constantly used, QAC has mad arrangements with leading vendors to provide Term Licenses (rentals) to our factory clients on a per hour basis. In other words, you can pay only for the tools you need, only when you need them.
We will convert the tool term license cost to a per hour basis, thus reducing the tool cost for each client with us aggregating the licenses. This results typically in a 30-45% saving for most clients.
This can easily cost 10's of thousands of dollers per group of testers. The main frustration is that most testing servers are only 50-80% utilized, 50% of the time. Thus resulting in idle server time and wasted computing power.
At the QAC Test Factory, we use descrete servers and storage where required by clients, and group our servers for 100% utilization all the time. This allows us to use less physical servers than our clients normally would. Also, we use Virtualization of Blade Servers so that we can dynamically allocate more or less CPU, I/O, RAM, Storage, etc to each server as it is needed for each individual testing project.
As a result, we can be better use out of less computing power and cost for each individual client's testing projects. Lesser idle time and better versatility = lower infrastructure costs for our clients, done less expensively than our clients' can. This results typically in a 10-25% saving for most clients.


