By Nenshad Bardoliwalla

In the wake of the long-running massive industry consolidation in the Enterprise Software industry that reached its zenith with the acquisitions of Business Intelligence market leaders Hyperion, Cognos, and Business Objects in 2007, one could certainly have been forgiven for being less than optimistic about the prospects of innovation in the Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management markets.  This is especially true given the dozens of innovative companies that each of these large best of breed vendors themselves had acquired before being acquired in turn.  While the pace of innovation has slowed to a crawl as the large vendors are midway through digesting the former best of breed market leaders, thankfully for the health of the industry, nothing could be further from the truth in the market overall.  This market has in fact shown itself to be very vibrant, with a resurgence of innovative offerings springing up in the wake of the fall of the largest best of breed vendors. So what are the trends and where do I see the industry evolving to?  Few of these are mutually exclusive, but in order to provide some categorization to the discussion, they have been broken down as follows:

by Jay Philips

It is very important to make sure that your application functions as expected. There may be times that you add one little piece of code and all of a sudden other parts of the application no longer works. You may not have time/capacity to manually go back and regression test all the pieces of your application to make sure they are up to par. Companies use a variety of different testing tools for regression testing. There are lots of tools out there from very expensive to open source.

Below is a list of some open source/free tools that may come in handy.

Please keep in mind that every application is different so the tool you pick from one application may not be the same tool that you pick for another. My advice would be to pick a tool that can meet most of your current and near future needs.