Test equipment vendors gain from providers' service level agreements offering high uptime

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 26 — As a new technology, cloud computing has many technical and operational challenges. Nonetheless, large enterprises invest heavily in the technology due to their advantages of scalability and cost efficiency. The uptake of cloud computing creates ample opportunities for test equipment vendors to develop solutions specifically for it.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan's Cloud Infrastructure Testing and Cloud-based Application Monitoring Markets research (http://www.testandmeasurement.frost.com) finds that each market earned revenues of $68.0 million and $168.0 million, respectively, within 2010. The analysis projects these markets to reach $320.2 and $556.2 million, respectively, by 2017.

If you are interested in more information on this research, please send an email to Jeannette Garcia, Corporate Communications, at jeannette.garcia@frost.com, with your full name, company name, job title, telephone number, company email address, company website, city, state and country.

The two most important factors for deploying cloud services are availability and security. Despite being hosted at a remote location, the application or data is accessible at all times. Security within the cloud market is also emerging and has many related aspects such as data protection, application security, privacy and standard compliance.

"Besides testing the cloud infrastructure for security, scalability and performance, enterprises also seek insights into the performance of applications hosted in the cloud environment," said Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst Srihari Padmanabhan. "Service providers, enterprise organizations and network engineers need to understand the root cause of faults in the network by gaining end-to-end visibility across the cloud, giving numerous opportunities for application monitoring as well."

Cloud computing is groundbreaking in the way scalable applications are deployed and delivered. The technology has attracted major end-user segments such as IT organizations, enterprises and governments. To tap this lucrative market, many leading test and monitoring companies have invested in developing solutions that help their customers test and validate a cloud infrastructure.

A cloud service provider normally signs a service level agreement (SLA) with its customer to establish the level of service that the network service provider will furnish. Most service providers guarantee an uptime of 99.99 percent.

"Every service provider is expected to meet the quality of service as defined by the SLA," said Padmanabhan. "To do this, service providers need to constantly monitor their cloud infrastructure and allocate resources so that applications can respond properly to peaks in a load."

Cloud-based application monitoring has witnessed the emergence of open-source solutions that can monitor the performance of cloud applications. Even though these solutions do not provide insights into the actual performance of the application, they have been widely accepted as an alternative to application performance monitoring solutions.

With the increase in demand for monitoring solutions, several other commercially backed open-source solutions will emerge in the market, posing a threat to companies who measure application performance.

"To reach success in such a market scenario, participants have to perform a careful analysis of the expected ROI and leverage their market intelligence information to determine growth opportunities," said Padmanabhan.

Cloud Infrastructure Testing and Cloud-based Application Monitoring Markets is part of the Test & Measurement Growth Partnership Services program, which also includes research in the following markets: Global Triple Play and Next-generation Services Test and Monitoring Markets, Global Gigabit Ethernet Test Equipment Market, Wireless Test Equipment Markets, and World xDSL Test Equipment Market. All research services included in subscriptions provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants.

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Source: Frost & Sullivan