Among the other top five PC vendors, only Lenovo managed to increase its market share, by a relatively modest two points, compared to Apple’s six-point gain over the same quarter a year ago. Acer, Dell and HP – the hardest hit – all lost market share. Now the second largest client PC vendor worldwide, HP will struggle to compete with Apple following the end of its Touchpad. 

“Currently, HP is pursuing a Windows strategy for its pad portfolio, producing enterprise-focused products, such as the recently launched Slate 2, until the launch of Windows 8,” said Canalys analyst Tim Coulling. “However, questions remain over Microsoft’s entry into the consumer pad space. While early demonstrations of the Window 8 operating system seem promising, Microsoft must focus its efforts on creating an intuitive user experience that is far less resource intensive.”

Dell placed fourth among the top five PC vendors, followed by Acer. Acer’s shipments continued to decline, as a result of the pad’s impact on the netbook market. It did, however, make headlines at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in January, when it revealed its S5 Ultrabook. Unsurprisingly, Acer and other vendors have been quick to announce their support for the new Ultrabook form factor, with the view of driving innovation and renewed customer interest in notebooks.

“We expect Ultrabook volumes to see limited adoption through the first half of 2012, before finally gaining momentum later in the year as price points decline and Intel launches a new line of processors and embarks on an aggressive marketing campaign,” said Canalys research analyst Michael Kauh. “In the short term though, vendors will experience more pressure in the netbook and notebook segments, especially with Apple’s annual iPad refresh approaching.”

Pads accounted for 22 percent of total PC shipments during Q4 2011. In addition to Apple’s strong performance, the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet by Barnes and Noble boosted volumes in the US market, allowing both vendors to claim spots among the top five worldwide pad makers, in second and fifth place respectively.

All regions grew year-on-year with the inclusion of pads. Excluding pads, however, shipments in Europe, Middle East and Africa and North America declined, due to weaker consumer demand in Western Europe and the United States, despite the traditional Q4 sales periods. Vendors and channel partners took a cautious approach to inventory levels in Q4, as many had expected a slow quarter. Notebook volumes grew slightly, at approximately 1% in these regions, but continued their impressive rise in Asia Pacific and Latin America, as more consumers embraced mobile computing.

“The consumerization of IT continues to be a significant disruptive force in the PC industry, but many of the leading vendors have failed to capitalize on the trend to date,” said Coulling. “This year will be a pivotal year for those vendors that were slow to launch pads. It is not just the product that they need to get right, business models are equally important – driving revenues from content delivery can help vendors reach lower price points in a market that is incredibly price sensitive.”

Neopost has a permanent focus on product quality, providing clients with innovative and efficient tools and systems that help automate and simplify the management of their business mail, such as folding and inserting equipment, postage meters and envelope address printers. To maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and innovation, Neopost regularly enriches its portfolio of solutions and services. In 2008, Neopost launched a new collection of next-generation devices.

“How a company manages its mail is highly sensitive as it is closely linked to financial matters,” said Patrick Blanluet, head of the Embedded Software Research & Development Department at Neopost France. “A software defect could result in a critical business error, such as incorrectly calculated mailing costs or even postal service stoppages. As a consequence, our products must demonstrate faultless quality, which necessitates rigorous testing of our devices and embedded software.”

Neopost devices include embedded software for the main device as well as peripheral items, such as digital weighing machines. The core software alone equates to more than 500,000 lines of code, the majority of which is heavily reused across products.

“Eighty percent of this core source code is common to all machines in our next-generation product line, the remaining 20 percent being specifically developed for each model,” explained Blanluet. “This repeatable approach enables us to develop the product suite more rapidly. Because software is reused across multiple products, the quality of the code is even more crucial as a lone defect could have ramifications for our entire product portfolio and customer base. It is therefore very important to have an accurate solution for testing code during development as the code is being written.”

In order to guarantee the integrity of the embedded software in its mailroom products, Neopost defined a rigorous internal testing process, including, among other aspects, the analysis of the source code in development.

“With the development of our new range of machines, we made the decision to select a development testing solution that would enable us to improve the discovery and correction of common errors that are not normally detected until the software is in a production environment,” continued Blanluet. “Memory leaks or overrun of an array are just some of the defects that can impact the productivity of the development teams and the overall quality of the products. After a detailed audit and evaluation of the solutions on the market, we selected Coverity.”

Following last issue’s feature about the skills and abilities that some people with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome can bring to software testing (link here), we recieve news from the North East-based software company Autism Works which aims to turn the positive traits of their condition into unique skills.

EIghty five percent of people in the UK with Autism are currently unemployed as the condition can make it very difficult for them to maintain mainstream employment. Some of the characteristics of the condition, however, can make people with Autism exceptionally talented software testers – a skill being put to good use by Autism Works.

The Newcastle-based organisation – which offers software and website testing services to clients across the region- is staffed almost-entirely by analysts who have Autism – the first company in England (and one of only a handful around the World) to be run this way.

“People on the Autism spectrum can make brilliant employees; diligent, loyal, precise and very often highly-intelligent. What is more, their attention to detail, methodical approach to tasks and frequent enjoyment of repetitive processes can make them exceptional software testers,” explains managing director Peter Macdonald. “On the other hand the condition makes it a major challenge for them to find and keep jobs, especially as traditional recruitment processes and workplace environments can often be very alien to them.  As a result, only 15 percent out of 400,000 adults in the UK with Autism are currently in paid employment, despite the fact that many are willing and capable of holding down a job with just a few reasonable adjustments to the workplace.

“We give them the training and environment they need to thrive – which does wonders for their self-respect and independence, while also offering a world class service to our customers.”

Offering testing for usability, regression, functionality and compatibility, Autism Works is being supported by Sunderland Software City, the regional initiative supporting and driving the growth of the North East software industry.

“The Autism Works story is little short of inspirational,” comments Sunderland Software City’s John Hart. “They offer a very valuable service at a comparatively low cost while at the same time having a hugely positive impact on society, and we’re proud to supporting them in their development.”

Autism Works is a non-profit trading subsidiary of North East charity Education and Services for People with Autism (ESPA). Chief executive Leslie Lane Added: “ESPA does a great deal in providing residential, education and support services for people with Autism in the North East, but achieving long term employment for people with Autism has always been difficult. Autism Works proves, that with some reasonable, and often very simple, work place adjustments, people on the spectrum can make highly effective employees.”

 www.sunderlandsoftwarecity.com

www.prweb.com//releases/2011/10/prweb8888216.htm

“By combining Spirent’s industry leading real world performance testing capabilities with iTrinegy’s accurate network emulation,  enterprises can assess the readiness of any new application, system upgrade or configuration change without putting the production network at risk,” said David Hill, vice president of EMEA at Spirent.  “This is a win-win partnership for our enterprises and cloud service provider customers.”

The Interxion Testlab deployment is a collaboration between Interxion, Flexiant, Boston Limited and GTT and acts as an online proof-of-concept (PoC) environment for cloud service providers. It can be used for testing scenarios before deploying a cloud infrastructure with the proof-of-concept being run on a reference architecture. This Testlab offers a framework that supports multiple hypervisors and allows service providers to build both private and public clouds.

The new test environment is located in Interxion’s City of London data centre and will deploy Flexiant’s Extility platform solution, have network connectivity via GTT and be housed on Supermicro hardware provisioned by Boston Limited.

“The rapid adoption of cloud computing has seen cloud-based services become a central part of business strategy,” comments Greg McCulloch, UK managing director, Interxion. “The launch of this UK Cloud Testlab deployment further reflects our commitment to the cloud and offers both customers and prospects the opportunity to test and develop cloud services at high speed and with best-in-class performance guarantees.”

“Information technology is becoming more and more sophisticated, complicated and as a result, more vulnerable,” says Anton von Troyer, vice president DACH from Codenomicon Deutchland. “We want to help training the future information security professionals to meet the challenge they are up against.”

Codenomicon’s Defensics test tool relies on fuzz testing, a technique where invalid or unexpected input is fed to the system under test to reveal potentially exploitable vulnerabilities. The technique is particularly effective in finding previously unknown, so called zero-day vulnerabilities. Unknown vulnerabilities are a challenge to product security, since there are no patches available, no way to protect the system against attacks targeted to unknown vulnerabilities.

“It is a fertile cooperation for both sides”, says Prof. Sachar Paulus from FH Brandenburg. “Beside the use of the software in teaching, possible innovations in the context of product use are examined together.”

Calyx Software, Gyrosoft, Trinity Computer Services, and divisions of MentecPlus, Touchstone Group, Sys-Care, and Avant-Garde have been integrated through acquisition into a single entity called m-hance. The announcement follows a series of recent acquisitions that has seen m-hance grow to 150 staff serving almost 1,000 direct customers across the UK and Ireland and a further 1000 through channel partners. The company operates from offices in Manchester, London, Loughborough, Dublin and Glasgow.

Mark Thompson, CEO of m-hance, comments, “The creation of m-hance allows us to go to our customers with a single, clear identity and message. The company benefits from the stability, long trading history and deep client relationships of each of the component entities. We’ve combined the strengths of seven respected specialists into one financially strong leader with an experienced management team backed-up by a solid balance sheet containing no external debt”.

The new structure allows the company to further develop its product set along vertical market specific lines. For example, in the distribution and manufacturing sectors it had been providing a best of breed industry solution including finance, CRM and other business critical functionality to more than 750 organisations for over 25 years and can now expand this model further into not-for-profit, education, financial services and hospitality and leisure, where it has a strong customer footprint.

So far Coverity’s Static Analysis testing tool has allegedly found over 40,000 defects in CERN’s software, which could have severely compromised the project had they not been detected. This case aptly showcases the importance of rigorous testing in a scientific experiment of the magnitude of the LHC project.

Director of software testing company BugFinders, Martin Mudge commented on the safety precautions involved in software testing: “Software testing is vital when the project involves safety critical systems. Sure, it’s bad when you come across a glitch in one of your iPhone apps, but if a computerised plane system gives the wrong information, it could end with serious loss of life. I wouldn’t dream what the consequences would be if a critical bug went unnoticed on a project involving nuclear energy.”

The fervent media controversy surrounding the Large Hadron Collider may have been overhyped, but there have been however past cases where a lack of testing has proven to be costly, sometimes even fatal.

The new Android testing capabilities complement the popular FoneMonkey for iOS (iPhone and iPad) automated testing tool and extends Gorilla Logic’s comprehensive open source automated testing solution set by bringing Android developers and QA testers the same recording/playback and test script generation already enjoyed by iOS developers. It benefits developers by providing rapid creation of functional testing scripts; allows testers without in-depth Android Software Developer Kit (SDK) knowledge to easily and quickly create testing scripts; and, offers increased application quality and faster time-to-market.

“FoneMonkey for Android addresses a major gap in the Android development tool chain,” said Stu Stern, president and CEO of Gorilla Logic and co-creator of FoneMonkey. “The FoneMonkey family of tools is the only record/playback functional testing tool for iOS and Android. With the addition of FoneMonkey for Android, Gorilla Logic has established its position as the pre-eminent provider of next generation functional testing tools for the mobile market.”

According to Gorilla, FoneMonkey is the only test tool for iOS and now Android that records all actions with the iPhone, iPad and Android phone while in use and plays them back as a test script at any time. It enables the interactive creation, editing and playback of automation scripts that exercise an application’s user interface. Using FoneMonkey, developers and quality assurance team members can create suites of tests that automate and perform user operation sequences, and then verify results. FoneMonkey supports development as well as QA testing, and tests can easily be incorporated into continuous integration environments.

FoneMonkey for Android is available now. Because it is an open source tool, it is free to download at www.gorillalogic.com/fonemonkey.