IDC: Applause Drives Real Business Value

The pressure is on. Software development organizations face unprecedented scrutiny over their budgets and resources due to ongoing macroeconomic headwinds. Every dollar must be strategically deployed to maximize the benefits of that investment, making it crucial for companies to understand how they utilize their resources.

When investing in partners, it is vital to assess the total value they provide. At Applause, we understand that delivering measurable value is a fundamental requirement for any organization evaluating solutions. Businesses today expect tangible results from their partnerships. That’s why we are committed to going above and beyond to not only provide substantial benefits but also to help our customers uncover the full potential of their digital quality operations and maximize the impact of their investment.

We engaged IDC to help us evaluate whether we are delivering on our promise of yielding maximum value as well as delivering comprehensive and flexible software testing, the ultimate tenets of an effective release partner. And, as we explore in this blog, the IDC findings — and quotes from participants — are compelling.

Delivering value in challenging economic times

Organizations are continually pressured to do more with less, striving to deliver high-quality software without inflating budgets. This balance between cost efficiency and quality is particularly challenging during economic downturns. Companies must scrutinize every expenditure to ensure maximum value, making it crucial to find partners who provide substantial value.

IDC’s latest report, The Business Value of Applause reveals several compelling statistics that point to the value of comprehensive and flexible crowdtesting. According to the report, organizations leveraging Applause’s world-class digital quality solutions realize benefits worth an annual average of $3.79 million per organization, including $2.38 million higher revenue, as teams are able to thread the needle between speed to market and quality.

The versatility of crowdtesting plays a critical role in achieving value in today’s uncertain economic environment. The demand for rapid software development is compounded by neverending competitive pressures, including expansion into new markets and maintaining device coverage, pushing organizations to think about how they can make efficient and effective application testing a priority. Only Applause addresses these challenges head-on by offering a dynamically scalable, flexible, on-demand and enterprise-grade testing solution that fits within many organizations’ continuous testing and DevOps strategies. As IDC determined, a dynamic partnership with Applause not only promotes innovation but also delivers cost avoidance and reduction, maintaining or even accelerating proficiency in testing amidst economic constraints. As one study participant stated, Applause is less an expenditure than a worthwhile investment.

“Applause has given us a much better presence and better confidence in everything post-purchase. It’s probably meant around $5 million in extra revenue across our online store and application.”

Comprehensive testing for product excellence

Ensuring comprehensive testing coverage is a major challenge for many organizations. With the increasing complexity of digital products and the rapid pace of releases, it’s easy for critical defects to slip through the cracks, leading to costly repercussions — delayed product releases, increased technical debt, brand reputation damage and more.

Organizations need robust testing solutions that cover every possible scenario without overextending their internal resources. A critical aspect of Applause’s value is our comprehensiveness, which directly reduces risk for our customers. IDC found that our clients see tremendous value in the risk mitigation that Applause provides. As the second-largest portion of the $3.79 million in average annual benefits per organization, risk mitigation accounted for more than $1.4 million in savings. This speaks to the real cost of defects and the imperative for businesses to reduce bugs to protect their brand reputation.

Here’s the full list of average annual benefits per organization:

1. Testing staff efficiencies ($1,620,400)
2. Risk mitigation benefits — reduced cost of bugs ($1,421,800)
3. Business productivity benefits — higher net revenue ($330,700)
4. Development productivity gains ($237,800)
5. Testing lab cost savings and efficiencies ($182,300)

This buried treasure of identifying and resolving critical issues early in the development process is often overlooked. Applause’s comprehensive testing solutions help businesses avoid the significant expenses associated with bug remediation and reputational damage. By preventing bugs from reaching production, Applause saves costs and protects end users. This proactive approach is vital in maintaining high-quality digital experiences, ensuring that issues are caught before they escalate into larger problems. As one IDC study participant stated, there was simply no other way to achieve the scale of testing that Applause provided.

“We needed a way to really test a new application specifically for the mobile side for global launches of our products. After reviewing our different options, including traditional functional testing, we realized that other approaches would’ve required hiring an army of people. Even using a testing house would have only provided functional scripted testing.”

Achieving flexibility and dynamic scale

Another significant challenge is maintaining flexibility in testing processes. There’s a lot to test, even more devices to test them on, and not a lot of time to get all of that done. Organizations must be able to scale their testing efforts up or down without sacrificing quality. This adaptability is essential for managing varying project scopes, budget constraints, and resource availability.

One of Applause’s unrivaled capabilities is its flexibility and ability to scale dynamically. Applause’s crowdtesting solutions adapt to varying roadmaps, internal resources, strategic needs and budgets, supporting organizations through different stages of product development and market conditions. And our customers find that other solutions fail to offer the same scalability and flexibility. IDC calculated that interviewed Applause customers save $182,300 per organization, per year in lab and device costs as well as staff resource time. Our customers agree.

“We had issues with being able to represent real-world hardware scenarios in different locations around the world … Applause offered us all the countries we were concerned about and gave us the flexibility and a capability that we could not simulate or emulate within a lab.”

Applause’s unparalleled ability to scale testing efforts up or down ensures that businesses can maintain critical coverage without overextending their resources. This adaptability supports both short-term needs and long-term strategic goals, providing a reliable partner through fluctuating demands.

Realizing efficiency gains and cost savings

Balancing efficiency and cost savings is a persistent challenge for organizations. With limited resources and high expectations, businesses must find ways to streamline operations and reduce costs without compromising on quality or speed. This balancing act is particularly tricky in the realm of software testing, where thoroughness is essential but the practice of quality assurance can be resource-intensive.

IDC highlighted another significant benefit our customers experience when working with Applause: measurable efficiency gains. Applause helps save 681 hours of staff time per release for clients, enabling internal teams to focus on other strategic projects.

“We would need four times as many testers to do what (Applause does). We have a global presence with distributed work, and Applause gives us the ability to truly test 24×7.”

This efficiency gain underscores Applause’s unique ability to streamline internal testing processes that support the development pipeline, reducing the need for in-house resources to meet unpredictable demands. By optimizing resource use, Applause enables businesses to maintain leaner teams and avoid costly outsourced testing vendors without compromising on coverage and quality. As a result, our customers experience faster testing cycles, quicker time to market and increased ability to focus on new features and products. The reduction of friction in the development process also results in more agile and responsive development teams — 13% higher dev team productivity, according to the report —which is critical for staying competitive in the market.

“Without Applause, we couldn’t meet our current testing timelines. It would take a team of two full-time engineers five to six days to finish everything for all our product portfolios. We’re able to bring that down to under three days across all the products with Applause.”

Reducing blind spots to see the big picture

Even the most rigorous internal testing processes can miss defects, leading to significant costs and operational disruptions. These blind spots undermine the reliability of digital products, damage brand reputation and incur hefty remediation costs.

Organizations need external perspectives to catch issues that internal teams might overlook. Despite thorough internal testing, defects can still escape into production, leading to significant costs and operational disruptions.

Crowdtesting helps mitigate these blind spots by providing an external layer of testing that catches issues that internal teams might miss, but only Applause offers the breadth and depth of testing expertise necessary to expose all of these hidden issues. Our clients frequently mentioned Applause’s localized testing capabilities in their responses, with many simply being unable to find a viable alternative to our global community of more than one million digital experts.

“Our online presence was being released to more and more countries, so we needed testing support to give us coverage … We felt that our own internal QA teams just couldn’t provide the perspective that we could get from actual testers in their native language in their native environments that Applause can do.”

Organizations often see only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to defects — one visible part of the problem obscures the many hidden issues lurking beneath the surface. The IDC report’s findings reinforce the importance of comprehensive external testing in identifying these hidden issues early. By leveraging Applause’s crowdtesting, organizations prevent costly defects from causing an iceberg’s worth of rework — bug identification, fixes, remediation, rollouts and retesting — while simultaneously safeguarding their reputation and user experience.

Applause stands out as a dynamic, future-proof release partner. Our ability to adapt to emerging technologies and evolving market demands is unparalleled. We provide robust, adaptable solutions that meet the challenges of both today, and tomorrow. Give us the chance to establish the value and ROI that many businesses have already realized — and as IDC confirmed — and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

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