This IDC study discusses the software as a service (SaaS) for automated software quality (ASQ) and emerging testing as a service (TaaS) competitive market forecast. This dynamic and expanding market experienced high-double-digit growth of 23% in 2009 to 205.6 million (a very small base). In the context of an overall 2009 ASQ market that declined 5.6%, however, this growth on even a small base is significant. Despite what has been a struggling economy, the SaaS ASQ and emerging TaaS market is slated for a very strong overall trajectory of growth over the forecast period. This growth results from a variety of factors including demand for dynamic provisioning, staffing cuts, and the need to manage quality with complex sourcing for application development projects, regulatory compliance, increased complexity of emerging development paradigms, and adoption of software-as-a-service licensing as organizations move toward cloud testing. As the largest vendors in the ASQ space have announced and delivered offerings in this market in 4Q09 and 1H10 and with strong early user adoption already, IDC expects a huge CAGR (on low initial base revenue) for 2009–2014 of 35.9% resulting in projected 2014 revenue of $954 million. At the same time, vendors must address user concerns about reliability, scalability, performance, and SLA management as cloud and TaaS offerings emerge.

"In the face of a chaotic global economy, constrained IT staffing, and complex sourcing, demand will emerge strongly for SaaS ASQ and TaaS solutions throughout our forecast period, driven by customer demand for innovative cloud delivery models for quality and offerings from both small third-party providers and larger vendors," says Melinda Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management at IDC. "As we continue to address a challenging and unpredictable global economy, financial constraints, global competitive markets, and innovation are driving higher comfort levels with SaaS approaches for testing. These enable rapid access to both quality solutions and support infrastructure to sustain complex software sourcing and distributed development environments. SaaS and TaaS require fewer resources and decapitalized expenditures and low initial cost compared with on-premise ASQ solutions and facilitate faster quality approaches. Smaller vendors will continue to play a role for market innovation, as we see from emerging SaaS and early 'cloud' testing solutions already with TaaS. We expect ongoing acquisitions in this space, particularly in the 2011–2013 time frame."