Tech Mahindra Testing Services (TMTS) has updated NelsonHall on its DevOps capabilities.

TMTS continues to work with CA Technologies around this offering, largely around service virtualization (SV), application release management (ARA) and together with other ISVs/open source software around agile testing/continuous integration (CI). (For more information on the offering, please refer to the previous blog post: http://research.nelson-hall.com/blog/?avpage-views=blog&type=post&post_id=188).

One of the recent changes introduced by Tech Mahindra has been the rebranding of the offering towards DevOps (from distinct SA, ARA, and CI offerings). The rebranding move reflects an effort by Tech Mahindra to use a now popular terminology in the market. Yet it also highlights the capabilities of TMTS, which goes further than CA software product-related professional services to a structured offering, which includes test data, test environment provisioning and a systematic coordination between production and development & testing.

Initial client demand has been around the initially CA-centric offerings has been healthy: TMTS’ CA TCoE now has a headcount of 25, up from 10 in March 2014. It has also trained 50 CA experts, the majority of which delivering service virtualization services to clients (35 personnel).

The CA TCoE is a virtualized one and covers five dedicated labs across India (Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai). The company has also added a new center in the U.S. for R&D purposes (and creating service virtualization reusable application and object simulations around SAP applications) and to some extent to support specific client implementations.

TMTS CA TCoE wants to go beyond CA product reselling and services fairly quickly: the unit has a number of IPs and specific offerings, including:

• Service virtualization as a service (SVaaS). SVaaS is an opex offering based on CA software products
• Integrated test environment management services (iTEMS) based on HP ALM and CA software. Hosting of these testing environments can be on-premise or virtual (either on private or public clouds)
• Virtualized mainframe testing (vMT): for driving cost savings on mainframe license costs when developing and testing mainframe applications. For more information on this offering, please refer to http://research.nelson-hall.com/blog/?avpage-views=blog&type=post&post_id=279.

Tech Mahindra Testing Services has structured its DevOps offering across the SDLC into five phases: continuous planning, integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring and feedback. Services offered include:

• Advisory services e.g. maturity assessment and roadmap; tool assessment; and organizational change management
• Implementation services; process modeling, solution map design and roll out; use case development; deployment of tools
• Support services: test environment provisioning; test data management; maintenance of DevOps tools; training; reporting
• Application delivery optimization as a service: a hosting service coupled with a opex offering for CA software licenses. ADO includes also advisory, and implementation services as well as support services.

Tech Mahindra wants to further develop its DevOps, through an incremental approach, in a approach it describes as “continuous innovation”. TMPS is to:

• Lower TCO by replacing COTS by open source software
• Create service virtualization assets in several sectors including financial service, manufacturing and healthcare/life science
• Expand its DevOps offering to mobile applications and to applications hosted in the cloud
• Develop niche offerings e.g. performance engineering, and service virtualization assets around SAP, Oracle and saleforce.com.

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Tech Mahindra continues its testing push on DevOps, expanding gradually from centricity around CA  software products towards a full DevOps offering. The offering is still small in terms in terms of size, as highlighted by the number of personnel have been trained on CA products. However, potentially, the market could be big. And certainly, DevOps is very much aligned with the current adoption of agile development and testing, which has accelerated in the past two years, largely driven by the surge of mobile applications and renewed phase of investment in front office/ebusiness applications. Of course, DevOps goes further agile by linking the IT infrastructure to the applications.

Will current around agile methodologies expand to DevOps: it looks so. Yet, patterns of new technology adoptions such as agile (in its third wave of adoption), cloud computing (remember on demand?), SaaS (ASP?) show that success is not systematic, even for offerings that are well-grounded and always require more time than initially; envisioned.

Tech Mahindra continues to deploy its approach to its testing offerings, deepening each offering over time. The approach is systematic and fast. Also it has so far refrained in testing from funding its investments in offerings, accelerators and IPs by selling its IPs as licensed products. This differs from what a couple of competitors are doing. From a client perspective, the service approach to IPs makes a more compelling business case.