Original Teams with Green Hat for SOA App Testing

July 14, 2009 Alex Woodie

To help combat the higher rate of application failure among service oriented architecture (SOA) applications than traditional non-SOA applications, software testing specialists Original Software is teaming up with Green Hat, who are experts in automated SOA testing, the vendors announced last week.

According to a report issued last year by Gartner, SOA applications tend to break more as the result of core application failures than traditional non-SOA applications. Specifically, the IT analyst group predicted that, through 2010, 60 percent of unplanned downtime for SOA-based, loosely-coupled applications will be the result of application failure, compared to 40 percent for non-SOA-based applications.

Obviously, the SOA ship needs to be tightened up a bit, and Original–which sells testing tools for i OS, databases, Windows, and the Web–wants to be just the guys to do it. Well, in concert with the pros over at Green Hat, anyway.

Green Hat is a London-based company that makes testing tools that delve into the hairy recesses of computer-to-computer connections. Because applications that are “loosely coupled” via SOA, Web services, and various messaging protocols most often don’t feature a GUI that a traditional testing tool can use to get at the functions, a different approach is warranted. Green Hat specializes in developing tools that exploit these alternative approaches, with a healthy dose of automation to minimize the amount of manual testing required.

The Green Hat solutions will benefit Original’s customer base, says Original Software CEO Colin Armitage.

“This alliance with Green Hat gives Original Software an important additional route to market and enables us to deliver a best of breed solution across the user interface, database layer, services, third-party systems, and middleware that will prevent unexpected costs and delays as critical applications become more complex,” Armitage states in a press release.

As part of the deal, Green Hat will OEM Original’s software as part of its GH Tester for BPM offering. This will give BPM project leaders more control over the GUI aspects of application testing, notes Green Hat president and CTO Peter Cole. “This alliance will give them a single point of contact for all their automated testing requirements,” he says.