Infrastructure—a structured platform of networked elements required to deliver services—is proliferating at an explosive rate.

Infrastructure is a critical and strategic component of every business. To protect a company’s brand promise, the infrastructure must be adequately and thoroughly tested. Optimizing testing for infrastructure is a problem that must be addressed and solved now. Organizations must be able to communicate, collaborate, and connect to share test information to deliver quality of service and to deliver high customer satisfaction. The brand is the promise an organization makes to its customers, and the infrastructure delivering real business value must deliver on that brand promise.

Service providers and network equipment manufacturers are adding automation to their pre-production testing process for a combination of reasons: improved test coverage, accelerated time-to-market for products or services, reduced capital and operational expense, optimized equipment use, reduced training time, greater test collaboration, reduced test backlog, and reuse. All of these automation drivers are intertwined and focus on delivering better quality to the customer. This Market Snapshot will focus on the need for test automation of networks and connected devices, identify a path to automation adoption and provide an overview of where the market is with respect to the right processes, technical skills and technology.