If you have already started selling managed services of some type, you know that there is more to it than buying a monitoring tool, installing it in your office, and getting a junior sales person to make thousands of phone calls. There has to be a value proposition that is compelling to what has been called, "The post chasm buyer". It has to actually meet a business need, provide a return on investment, or move a customer closer to some federal security requirement. Before you move forward, there are four key questions you need to ask:

1. What will you offer?

You know how most SMB companies don't have time to keep up with their IT environment? Patches are often out of date, security is very weak, main business systems are not highly-available, backups have never been checked, and there is either one or just a part time person dedicated to keeping everything going (a major security risk in itself). Now you need a program that solves problem. Its not monitoring, its much more.

You need a program. Your program consists of everything you can do to help a manager or business owner forget about IT. Systems have to be assessed for areas of risk (security holes, points of failure, inadequate procedures and personnel, etc.). Then, your client's infrastructure needs to be repaired, optimized, stabilized, and cleaned up from spyware, RATs (remote access trojans), and other security/availability problems. Finally, a program to keep things going must be put into place. This might include periodic planning meetings, reports that forecast disk space and bandwidth constraints, quarterly or monthly onsite proactive maintenance (some of this might be done remotely or through automated systems), and of course, 7 by 24 monitoring. The bottom line is, post chasm buyers are not going to buy monitoring; they are going to buy uptime.

2. How will you build it?

You might have something in place right now - perhaps you do it all yourself. But as Mack Hanan pointed out in his book "Consultative Selling", a book written in 1972 on selling profit improvement, selling hours for dollars is always a commodity and will not build a long term profitable business. You need leverage.

Start by listing everything you could do for a company on a periodic basis and categorize it by system. You might have servers, workstations, network components, etc. Then you have administrative tasks that parallel these devices; Helpdesk services, planning and strategy, user awareness training, etc. I recommend that you add security as a separate section where we will list higher level security options in addition to items that will fall under each component. Now figure out what you can automate through tools that are out on market today.

Repeatable Test Cases with Static Data

The true cost benefit of test automation is achieved only when same scripts are executed multiple times. The first execution is very expensive because it includes one-time cost of automation tools and 100% of Test Automation engineer’s time. When scripts are executed again, cost of test automation declines sharply. The tool has already been purchased and scripts have already been coded. If there have been changes in application, scripts may require maintenance before being executed. Maintenance on minor software updates should be minimal.

Because test automation is only successful when scripts can be executed multiple times, only application which require same test cases to be executed with same data are good candidates for automation. For example, a mortgage application that needs to be regression tested on a weekly basis could be a good candidate for test automation. Script maintenance is minimal and scripts can enter a mortgage application using same group of test data in a fraction of time it would take a manual tester to test same functionality.

On other hand, a mortgage origination system, which cannot use same test data for each iteration would not be a good automation candidate. Due to nature of mortgage systems, data could be staged in various states of approval or rejection, based on current data and departments who have already processed their part of mortgage application. If script cannot easily figure out what data to enter in software, it is not a good automation candidate.

Another problem with automating this type of complex system is that test environment often contains a sampling of production data that is refreshed on a periodic basis. Sometimes this can be overcome by rebuilding test data when test environment is refreshed. The feasibility of rebuilding test data on a regular basis depends on complexity of application. You will have to make that decision on a case-by-case basis.

Application or Environmental Stability

Environmental stability is crucial to a successfully automating a software testing project. Scripts cannot be coded in a timely manner if application environment is unavailable, experiences frequent down-times, or excessive defects and errors.

Little or No Application or Environment Downtime