Virtustream announces partnership with Infosys, NetApp and Cisco

.Virtustream has announced a joint partnership with Infosys and NetApp to deliver assured Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS) for applications built on the SAP HANA® platform. The new service, called TaaS Powered by xStream for SAP® applications, will provide turnkey-testing on-site at a customer’s data center, in the Virtustream cloud, and via other enterprise cloud service providers that are powered by xStream, including those supporting the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service. The TaaS service also features Cisco networking technology and Cisco UCS servers based on Intel E7 V2 processors.

The TaaS Powered by xStream offering will enable QA teams to significantly reduce both the time required to take a solution to market and the resources required to test SAP applications for issues or implement new functionality, modules and enhancement packs via a pay-as-you-go model, as opposed to a subscription service.

“Testing and QA groups are being pushed to lower the costs for resources and infrastructure to support a sound testing process, while at the same time being pushed to speed up their time-to-market and reduce the error rate of changes to systems,” said Michael Hoch, SVP Cloud Advisory Services at Virtustream. "Virtustream, Infosys and NetApp have banded together to address each of these areas by helping to reduce the resources required to quality test software, with assurance that the changes reaching the production environment have as few defects or quality issues as possible.

“Most importantly,” Hoch continued, “TaaS Powered by xStream can help cut the QA process by an order of magnitude and dramatically shrink the overall lead time for getting changes into production while enabling more frequent releases of improvements to businesses.”

As part of this partnership, Virtustream, Infosys, NetApp and Cisco will lend their respective expertise and industry-leading solutions to the TaaS Powered by xStream offering for SAP applications, including those running on SAP HANA. The Infosys ERP Package Testing and Validation Practice delivers a comprehensive suite of testing services, led by testing professionals that specialise in ERP and SAP applications, tools and accelerators. In the cloud, Virtustream’s xStream platform provides an on-demand, cloud-based delivery model for TaaS for SAP applications, including guaranteed service levels, high-availability and disaster-recovery functionality required for mission-critical enterprise applications. On-site, Virtustream’s xStream provides the cloud orchestration for compute and storage across FlexPod® architecture – offered jointly by NetApp and Cisco.

In addition, Cisco and NetApp provide the FlexPods® with FlexClone®, enabling parallel work streams, as well as increased speed for building and refreshing SAP solution-based landscapes and automation of highly repetitive tasks common in testing services. Intel’s cloud reference architecture and its Xeon® processors underpin both the cloud-based and on-premises options for TaaS Powered by xStream for SAP applications to enable rapid deployment in the cloud.