Tricentis GmbH, a major provider of tools for testing the reliability of enterprise software, has acquired Neotys SAS, another player in the software testing market that counts tech giants such as Cisco Systems Inc. among its customers.

The deal is the latest in a series of acquisitions made by Tricentis in recent years.

Tricentis, based in Mountain View, California, and Vienna, is backed by more than $170 million in venture funding. The company is one of the industry’s largest providers of so-called continuous testing tools, which enables software teams to catch technical issues introduced into applications by faulty updates. Tricentis’ tools carry out tests automatically using an artificial intelligence-based approach that it says reduces the amount of manual work involved in the process by up to 80%. 

Paris-based Neotys focuses on the adjacent area of application performance testing. The company’s flagship product, NeoLoad, can be used to detect cases when a business application carries out user requests too slowly. The software lends itself to tasks like assessing how quickly a database fetches records and measuring the amount of time it takes a web page to load.

Tricentis says NeoLoad is used by more than 600 organizations including Cisco, Dell Technologies Inc. and other major enterprises. Those customer accounts will be absorbed by the company following the deal, along with NeoLoad itself.

The acquisition will enable Tricentis to expand the breadth of its automated testing capabilities at a time when automation is becoming an increasingly important part of enterprises’ software development projects. Thanks to software containers, many developer teams now release improvements for their applications every few days instead of monthly or quarterly as was once the practice. The high frequency of changes makes it impractical to check every single update by hand for issues, which creates the need to automate more parts of the testing workflow.

On top of measuring application performance, Neotys’ NeoLoad tool also helps developers with a number of related tasks. Among others, the tool can be used to test the maximum number of users that an application is capable of supporting at once. For example, if a company is deploying a new data visualization platform for its team of 200 business analysts, it could harness NeoLoad to check if the platform is capable of maintaining acceptable performance as 200 concurrent users log in at the same time.

Neotys’ technology will complement Tricentis’ existing application performance testing tool, Flood. The company obtained Flood through an acquisition as well that it announced back in 2017. More recently, last year, Tricentis bought SpecFlow Inc., a developer of software for testing applications built with Microsoft Corp.’s popular .NET framework. 

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