According to a recent Deloitte report on post COVID-19 enterprise implications, “…the pandemic is reshaping the global business landscape and fundamentally changing how people around the world live and work… However, every new normal eventually gets replaced by a new new normal, so in our view it makes sense to call the post-COVID business environment the next normal.”

The report delved further into the changing business conditions and priorities emerging from the pandemic, highlighting the following among other takeaways:

Cloud computing is poised to accelerate, with 80% of respondents stating that cloud is now the most relevant technology
Next normal customer engagement strategies will be driven by digital channels and flexible customer experiences
These points reflect what we’re also seeing in the industry. Cloud offers organizations numerous opportunities to accelerate innovation, reduce costs and increase flexibility. By deploying our Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) Platform via the cloud, companies of all sizes can accelerate the pace of delivery while ensuring a high-quality customer experience.

This brings us to the second takeaway from the Deloitte report. In the next normal, customer engagement strategies will be an even more critical competitive differentiator, with shifting most transactions to digital channels highlighted as the most popular strategy. Companies simply cannot do this effectively if they fail to test the entire user journey.

Now more than ever, organizations must automate the entire test lifecycle and understand the quality of the experiences they are delivering. With our market-leading user-centric approach to testing, Eggplant enables companies to continually refine their digital properties based upon how customers are actually interacting with the technology. As a result, businesses can quickly and easily understand the quantified user impact of new product versions both prior to release and after the software has been deployed—ensuring continuous quality tied to business outcomes.

Through our hosted platform companies can more quickly avail of these capabilities, enjoying enhanced levels of automation, faster time to market and an accelerated pace of continuous delivery.

As organizations navigate the next normal, a laser focus on customer experiences and a technologically flexible business environment will be critical. Eggplant seamlessly addresses both of these requirements, enabling companies to choose the right deployment option for their needs and continually test the quality of their digital experiences.

Overview

Eggplant, the intelligent test automation specialist and a part of Keysight Technologies, announced the launch of its cloud-based platform in October 2020. The release extended the company’s Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) Platform to the cloud, enabling organizations to deploy end-to-end test automation more quickly and with less infrastructure overhead. The stated goals were faster time to market, broader coverage across platforms, and continuous quality assurance across the full software delivery lifecycle.

Why Cloud-Based Test Automation Matters

Enterprise adoption of cloud infrastructure accelerated sharply in 2020, driven by the shift to distributed workforces and the increased reliance on digital services. As application environments grew more complex — spanning mobile, web, IoT, desktop, and mainframe — traditional on-premise test infrastructure struggled to keep pace with continuous delivery pipelines.

Eggplant cited a Deloitte finding that 80 percent of enterprises expected cloud to be their most relevant technology, underscoring the urgency for testing tools that are cloud-native, scalable, and easy to integrate into existing CI/CD workflows.

Key Features of the DAI Cloud Platform

The cloud release of the DAI platform introduced several capabilities designed to reduce friction in test automation at scale:

Cloud-Based End-to-End Automation

A scalable fusion engine enables continuous and parallel end-to-end testing in the cloud. Tests can run across any application or website and on any target platform, removing the bottleneck of sequential, single-environment test runs. This approach is designed to make testing faster without requiring additional local infrastructure.

Monitoring and UX Insights

The platform adds advanced user experience (UX) data points and metrics, giving teams the ability to benchmark application UX performance over time. According to Eggplant, these insights — combined with behavioral UX data — can also help inform SEO improvements, though the mechanism for this was not elaborated on in the announcement.

Fully Automated, Self-Healing Test Assets

One of the more technically significant features is AI-driven self-healing tests. The platform uses AI to identify which tests are needed, then builds and runs them automatically. Critically, these tests self-heal — meaning they automatically adapt when the system under test changes, such as when a UI element is repositioned or renamed. This reduces the ongoing maintenance burden that typically makes large test suites expensive to sustain.

Pre- and Post-Release Quality Quantification

Beyond shift-left testing, the DAI cloud platform is designed to monitor quality after deployment as well. Organizations can quantify the impact of software updates both before and after release, creating a feedback loop that connects testing to real-world user experience outcomes. This positions the tool not just as a QA gate, but as a continuous quality signal integrated into the delivery pipeline.

Industry Adoption

At the time of the announcement, Eggplant reported that companies across financial services, healthcare, and retail were already using the cloud platform for intelligent automation. These are sectors where reliability, compliance, and user experience are high stakes, making continuous and automated quality assurance particularly valuable.

On-Premise Support Continues

For organizations that cannot move testing workloads to the cloud — due to data residency requirements, security policy, or legacy infrastructure constraints — Eggplant confirmed it would continue to support and actively develop the on-premise DAI Platform alongside the new cloud offering.

Quote from Eggplant Leadership

“The launch of our cloud platform is a significant milestone in our mission to rid the world of bad software. In our new normal, delivering speed and agility at scale has never been more critical. Every business can easily tap into Eggplant’s AI-powered automation platform to accelerate the pace of delivery while ensuring a high-quality digital experience.”

— Gareth Smith, CTO, Eggplant

About Eggplant

Eggplant, part of Keysight Technologies, provides user-centric intelligent testing and performance solutions. The platform is designed to optimize the digital experience across different interfaces, platforms, browsers, and devices — including mobile, IoT, desktop, and mainframe applications. Its DAI suite covers testing, monitoring, analysis, and reporting across the full software quality lifecycle.