The NeoLoad story starts a new chapter

Neotys is joining Tricentis! The leader in automated continuous testing now has the leader in automated continuous performance testing in its portfolio. Rarely is it so obvious that there’s such a perfectly snug fit between two companies. Neotys and Tricentis have had a strong partnership for many years, and we keep hearing from our customers that our offerings dovetail so seamlessly that this alliance should go further. The next logical step is to join forces, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I encourage you to check out for the webinar Introducing Tricentis NeoLoad: Behind the Neotys acquisition where I share more information and details.

NeoLoad sets out to be the performance testing leader

When my partners and I founded Neotys 17 years ago, we had one goal: to make performance testing easier, faster, more efficient and more effective. As developers acting as performance engineers ourselves, we were frustrated that the existing tools on the market were unable to keep pace with the accelerated speed of Agile. The only products that were any good at performance testing applications under peak load were so complicated that only specialized experts could use them. They required a lot of time-consuming manual work, or had brittle scripts that broke every time the application code changed. Quite simply, they were (and mostly still are) old-fashioned and not well-suited to adapt to changing times.

So, we re-imagined a modern way to design, update and run performance tests, and NeoLoad was born. The basic idea is pretty obvious: you have to be able to test faster in order to release faster with confidence. We adopted a low-code/no-code approach to test design and introduced a high degree of automation into test maintenance and execution. We automated much of the tedious work that had turned manual performance testing into such a bottleneck.

Continuous innovation for continuous performance

Over the years as the software development and delivery landscape evolved, we continuously introduced features and benefits that allowed the world’s largest enterprises to accelerate their performance testing. It’s been the feedback from conversations with our customers that has made NeoLoad what it is today. We listen to what customers need, then respond with market-leading innovation (Flex, AJAX, REST APIs, mobile). And we always kept in mind the challenges facing enterprises — like simplifying SAP performance testing, from the legacy stack to S/4 HANA, or enabling “one and done” Citrix testing, supporting complex multi-cloud testing and empowering companies to undertake cloud migrations with confidence.

But we also simultaneously innovated to support modern methodologies. As DevOps became more mainstream, NeoLoad’s ease of use, high levels of automation, and rich integrations with the rest of the modern development/delivery toolchain made it ideally suited to empowering non-performance experts to integrate continuous performance testing into their automated CI/CD pipelines.

Through the years we have always remained laser-focused on performance engineering. That’s our expertise — we have some of the field’s top thought leaders, our people know performance engineering inside and out, and we have even built a community of other experts (Neotys Performance Advisory Council) — and we have relentlessly pursued innovation to performance engineering. We lived and breathed load and performance testing; that’s all we did. And today we are recognized as the most automated, versatile, and modern performance testing solution available.

NeoLoad at the crossroads

As has been widely noted, the pandemic triggered 2-3 years’ worth of digital transformation in just 2-3 months. Competitive market forces have been driving increasingly more rapid software release cycles for a while, but the pandemic shined a spotlight on the business risks of speed without quality. Those organizations with slow, crashing or buggy software have suffered damage to their brand reputations and seen negative bottom-line impact. Testing software at speed and scale has become a business priority for every enterprise, across every industry. And this is a reality that will remain well after everything is back to “normal” — continuous testing is no longer a nice-to-have insurance policy, it’s a must-have business imperative.

In fact, Neotys realized its best year ever despite the pandemic. While that’s an achievement we’re proud of, it raises some fundamental questions:

• How do we take performance testing to the next level?
• What’s the best path forward to continue innovating and scaling the business?
• And, most importantly, what’s best for our existing and future customers?

The best way to take performance engineering to the next level

Specifically, with application development and delivery increasingly moving to the cloud, we can see that AI and machine learning are the future to further reduce manual and repetitive tasks in continuous testing. Is this something we want to continue to develop on our own? Or partner up with a company that is farther along this journey than we are?

Second, as performance testing has become more imperative throughout the entire lifecycle — both shifting-left over to the developer side of DevOps and shifting-right to the operations side (where our integrations with leading APM vendors are best-in-class) — are we missing out on opportunities to capitalize on synergies from even tighter integration with functional testing? Might continuous testing be better realized from a single centralized platform that spans the entirety of the SDLC?

Lastly, from a purely business perspective, some customers are committed to having just one standardized testing platform. We hear from performance engineers that they love NeoLoad and very much would like to switch from legacy testing tools but that it isn’t solely a performance testing decision — the company is then forced to stick with their old tools (warts and all) so that all testers are on the same platform.

Why we’re psyched for NeoLoad to join the Tricentis family

NeoLoad joining Tricentis is so obvious that you may wonder why it hadn’t happened already. The truth is, Neotys wasn’t ready. We wanted to cement our position as the leader in performance testing and were exploring whether we could take things to the next level ourselves. But the opportunity to grow with Tricentis is too compelling to pass up. There are many reasons why we are so excited to join forces with Tricentis, but the main ones are:

Shared vision and mission. We’re both all about leaving behind the legacy ways of doing things and taking a modern approach to testing. Eliminating or reducing laborious coding by hand. Automating manual tasks. Accelerating delivery while reducing risk. Focusing on perpetual innovation.

Perfect portfolio fit. The only gap in the Tricentis platform was enterprise app performance testing. Tosca is the undisputed leader in functional test automation — and now customers are able to convert SAP functional tests into performance tests with just a click — qTest in Agile test management, LiveCompare for AI-powered impact analysis for SAP updates, Analytics for consolidated view of continuous testing analysis and reporting, Flood for developer-based performance testing. Now with NeoLoad, we have all the bases covered.

Standardized platform. Now we offer customers an even better alternative to their legacy solutions. We bring together the best continuous testing tools on the market into one next-gen platform to test everything from APIs to enterprise applications like SAP. We heard this loud and clear from our customers, and Tricentis also did from theirs (many of whom are the same enterprises): they want to leave Micro Focus but they need the full portfolio.

Growth potential. We’re proud of how we’ve been able to build Neotys into a leading company. But to hit the next level, we need somebody who’s been there, done that. That’s why we’re excited to have Tricentis scale the continuous performance testing business — they know how to grow a great company. And not only on the business side; just see what Tricentis is already doing with AI/ML analytics. And we all believe that with NeoLoad, Tricentis will have unstoppable momentum.

A final word

Tricentis and Neotys share one other foundational principle: everything revolves around our customers. Does our automated continuous testing platform solve real business problems and empower you to eliminate manual tasks, accelerate release cycles, and reduce business risk? With Neotys joining Tricentis, we think so.

Please check out the webinar Introducing Tricentis NeoLoad: Behind the Neotys acquisition where we share details about the acquisition and you will learn how Tricentis Tosca integrates with NeoLoad to create a single test definition for functional and performance testing, as well as how this solution enables you to deliver business-critical innovation faster and more reliably.

I would like to personally thank the Neotys teams who have been pushing so hard to get us here and our customers and partners for their continuous support, encouragement and feedback. Together, you have made NeoLoad the most highly respected load and performance testing solution on the market. And many thanks to our advisor Stephan Dietrich and our investors Ardian and Bpifrance Digital Venture for the trust, advice and nudges. And finally, I thank all the people who have crossed our path and helped us at the different stages of our development, from the incubator to these latest steps.

We look forward to continuing our journey with you in this exciting new chapter to the NeoLoad story!