Bob Appleyard
Service Lead, Sun Microsystems
1. How long have you been working in the IT industry?
I have worked in the IT industry since 1981, starting my career as a Junior Operator and progressing through various operational and managerial roles before joining Sun in 1999. I started my career at Bradford & Bingley Building Society, since then I have held positions with the NEXT Group, including Grattan Plc and British Satellite Broadcasting, before leaving in 1991 to join National Power and then Sun Microsystems.
2. What advantages has partnering with AppLabs given Sun in delivering its services or creating a value added proposition?
By partnering with AppLabs we are able to provide our clients with industry best practice. Having a testing specialist involved from the development stage, allows us to identify the areas that are most at risk and ensure we focus on testing these areas from the outset of the project.
By bringing in AppLabs, which specializes in quality management and testing, it enables us to present a far richer proposition to our clients ensuring that our products integrate successfully with the clients’ infrastructure and applications.
3. Do you think organizations give quality management and testing a significant enough role when implementing an IT project?
Generally, I believe that quality management and testing is not always considered from the outset. This is because they are often seen as overheads to a project and potential barriers from a timely ‘go to market’ perspective. However, I firmly believe that quality needs to be designed in and not added on at the end. Testing, if done properly, should also been seen as an enabler for a faster, risk free implementation and not seen as a blocker.
Again if the testing requirements are understood and IT projects are designed to meet the requirements of testing from the outset, what is typically seen as an inconvenience at the end, will actually become a simple quality approval process.
4. What do you think is the hottest issue in the technology industry at the moment that will impact the way organizations approach quality management and testing?
As more and more organizations are struggling with regards to lack of data centre space, power, cooling etc. there is more demand for consolidated and virtualized infrastructures from both a server and storage perspective. In my experience the business typically holds the budget and is quite parochial in who uses what in terms of infrastructure. Sharing services and storage is still a hurdle we have to overcome and I feel that quality management and testing will play a large part in giving organizations the confidence they need when different applications are effectively hosted from a single large server.
5. How do you think this particular industry will look in the next five years? What would you like to see happen in that time?
A shift from reactive IT management to proactive business aligned planning and service management. Configuration Management Data Bases (CMDB) are currently weak, IT personnel struggle to understand the application dependency maps and true service alignment to the business is not there. I would like to see the emphasis change and the quality of service to the end user become the key driver for success.
6. What is your mantra/ golden rule that would define your thoughts on the importance of implementing a problem free IT project?
My golden rule has always been to focus on the service that is being delivered and the impact this has on the business or the end-user. The IT industry needs to take time to fully understand the client’s requirements and ensure expectations are agreed from the outset. From there you need to design to meet those requirements and focus on the service that is being delivered to the end customer. Plan your testing to start at the beginning and ensure it is not seen as an add on at the end. In summary my golden rule or vision is to ensure that ‘There will never be a service outage.’
What our clients say
“SAP selected AppLabs because of their proven expertise in testing large enterprise applications. Their ability to work with our teams across multiple continents and test a complex enterprise application is a testament to their world-class QA processes.”
Vice President (Solution Execution), SAP America