Software-testing tasks, be it the banking, retail, finance, insurance or payments industry, can be laborious and time-consuming to do manually. In addition, a manual approach might not always be effective in finding certain classes of defects.
Back in 2010, Payeli Ghosh, a serial entrepreneur, would often discuss the need for test automation in various industries and mull over effective solutions to address the problem in various domains.
She observed that test automation would offer the possibility of performing tests effectively.
During November 2012, she along with four other co-founders launched Option3, an automation and data analytics company that strives to create intelligent automation through concrete R&D.
“Option3 is a niche automation and data analytics product company focused on providing affordable automation solutions to companies across domains,” said Ghosh.
She added that her firm aims to empower businesses with powerful yet easy-to-use technology and cognitive solutions for problems. It offers a suite of domain-ready capabilities that can implement any kind of automation and cognitive solutions, such as DevOps, test automation, robotic process automation, or analytics.
How does it work?
The automation and analytics capabilities of the company include end-to-end test automation solutions across domains, including the retail, banking, insurance and payments industry (JiffyTest), cognitive solutions for business process automation using machine learning software bots (JiffyRPA), and analytics and monitoring solutions (Docube) that can visualize data and track every insight derived across the organization real time.
JiffyTest helps development, QA and DevOps teams across organizations to automate software-testing with a few clicks. It is a drag-and-drop process, which means even people with no technical experience can automate using Jiffy.
With DevOps and Agile becoming the new norm in software development, Jiffy has become a tool of choice due to ease of use and the speed with which one can automate tests during a sprint.
The cognitive engine of Jiffy helps software development organizations reduce redundant tests, as Jiffy will recommend what needs to be tested based on the changes made. What it results in is lower effort, cost-savings, faster time to market, and to add to all this a collaborative platform for the entire IT organization.
JiffyRPA helps customers automate tasks through intelligent robots that can detect and adapt automated scenarios based on change.
This allows organizations to utilize staff more productively, without having to worry about tasks that are critical yet add no value to the system. Right from processing unstructured data that is captured in different formats, to making cognitive decisions and using NLP and ML-based algorithms, JiffyRPA has helped customers achieve over 90% of automation.
This is significant as most traditional RPA solutions are rule-based and only achieve lower automation levels for complex processes.
What’s business like?
The company is still bootstrapped and sustaining on organic growth. Its products are used by a number of Fortune 100 customers in the US. After making inroads into the UK and Europe, this year it started its customer journey into India and West Asia.
JiffyTest is based on a license-cum-services revenue model while JiffyRPA is a bot-based revenue model with services. “We may be one of the few players who deliver outcome-based automation for our customers,” said Ghosh.
The company claims to register an annual growth rate crossing 100 per cent year-on-year.
Plenty of opportunities out there
The global test automation market is projected to cross the $100 bn mark by 2025, while the RPA market is projected to cross $9 bn within the same period, according to Ghosh.
“We believe that our product is uniquely positioned to play in this space, due to its cognitive capabilities, which is where automation is going to define itself. We expect to be among the top five players in test automation and RPA in the next 36 months. This would mean at least 10 per cent share in the overall market.”
Jiffy currently competes with a number of test automation players in the market, including HP. Jiffy RPA is competing with the likes of UiPath and Blue Prism in the RPA space. These are companies which have already been present in the market for 9-10 years.
Ghosh points out that what sets Jiffy apart is the cognitive layer in the platform that searches and understands patterns and behaviour in work flows over a period, making them intelligent robots rather than just rule-based robots. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities provide Jiffy a significant advantage over other products in the market.
On the roadmap
The company is looking at having the product penetrate deeper into the respective geographies, as the cognitive layer in the platform allows organizations to add more value to their business. The platform is also customizable to be package-ready for integration with other domain-specific modules across IT, supply chain, business process management and shared services functions.
“We are in the process of providing industry-specific automation packages. We have already achieved a fair amount in retail, F&A and manufacturing. We continuing to develop for other industry verticals, including banking. Apart from enriching the cognitive capabilities, we are also looking at tighter integration with enterprise applications to increase automation,” said Ghosh.
