IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution – Deliver Fast Time to Market

Managing test data proactively using the IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution helps deliver faster time-to-market, reduced development costs and higher quality for both package and custom enterprise applications. We have implemented numerous test data management solutions for our clients using IBM Optim.

For each production instance, enterprise IT organizations typically maintain multiple clones of the production environment for backup, development, test, upgrade assessment, training, quality assurance and other activities. This leads to uncontrolled investments in hardware to store and manage these data sets. Maintenance burdens increase, and rolling out new application features takes much more time, effort and resources. An effective way to reduce the cost and overhead of test data management is by subsetting production data for test purposes. IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution is an ideal product to achieve these goals.

We use IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution for our clients to create realistic, right-sized test databases, protecting data privacy in development and testing environments, and validating test results. This helps to eliminate expensive cloning processes and correct defects early in the development processwhere they are cheapest and easiest to fix. In addition, IBM Optim scales meets virtually any development or testing requirements across a wide range of applications, databases, operating systems and hardware platforms.

Additionally, we build optimized test environments to create targeted test scenarios designed to trigger specific error conditions. A simplistic, one-dimensional view of test data is typically insufficient for this purpose. Data from multiple tables is extracted for comprehensive test data. After a test run, IBM Optim analyzes the "before" and "after" images of the test data, automatically detects any differences, and presents the results in a concise report. It also provides comparative results in a highlighted display for easy analysis, saving countless hours. IBM Optim improves all phases of application testing. An intuitive, online interface and full-function browse utility eliminate time-consuming and error-prone table-by-table comparisons. IBM Optim not only identifies the expected database changes, but also uncovers differences that might otherwise go undetected. Those application issues that are hidden or difficult to trace can be identified quickly and resolved at a fraction of the cost.

This past year, we implemented IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution for a large online travel service running Oracle E-Business Suite. Our client had ten costly development, test and training instances which were hosted by Oracle On Demand. The goal of this project was to dramatically reduce the size of these ten instances by implementing IBM Optim Test Data Management Solution on Linux. In six weeks, we implemented subsetting for Oracle General Ledger, Payables and Purchasing. As a result, we quickly reduced annual storage costs by $240,000 with instant payback. Moreover, our client can now take the knowledge gained from this project to implement Optim for other high-payback projects.