Kony and SOASTA announced a partnership that combines both companies’ capabilities to optimize the performance of enterprise mobile apps across the mobile application development lifecycle.

Through this partnership, Kony and SOASTA will work together to integrate their technologies and combine their expertise to deliver a comprehensive, integrated mobile solution across the DevOps lifecycle for customers. As a result, from prototype to production, mobile apps built on the Kony Mobility Platform can be tested, monitored, measured, analyzed and optimized for peak performance with SOASTA’s TouchTest, CloudTest and mPulse solutions for an integrated Mobile DevOps solution.

According to industry analyst firm Gartner, “The need for automation in mobile application testing is high, and is being driven by agile development practices and a desire to drive quality and features based on user analytics. This pace, combined with a broad and changing device ecosystem, creates a test explosion that without automation will end up crushing all but the most trivial application efforts.” (Gartner, Market Guide for Mobile Application Testing, 3 December 2014)

The Kony Mobility Platform is an open and standards-based, integrated platform that supports the entire application software development lifecycle (SDLC), and empowers enterprises to quickly design, build, deploy and manage multi-edge app experiences. The combined Kony and SOASTA offering delivers an expanded, comprehensive new generation mobile DevOps lifecycle support, including design prototyping, rapid development, functional test automation, back-end integration, deployment, user monitoring and advanced mobile real-time analytics. No other vendor is offering this kind of comprehensive solution. This underscores SOASTA and Kony’s commitment to providing the highest level of mobile developer support, helping enterprise companies align business and IT, while also keeping the rapidly growing mobile user population productive on their systems.

DevOps is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration, integration, automation and measurement of cooperation between software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals. DevOps acknowledges the interdependence of software development, quality assurance and IT operations and aims to help an organization rapidly produce software products and services and to improve operations performance.

“In the rapidly growing world of mobile, user experience and application performance are fundamental to enterprise mobile application adoption and success,” said Thomas E. Hogan, CEO, Kony, Inc. “By adding performance analytics and testing solutions to our market-leading enterprise mobility platform, we will empower developers and DevOps teams with the best platform for creating mobile applications at any scale, with the best performance and experience.”

With the integration of Kony and SOASTA, the following new capabilities will be offered to customers:

- Mobile test automation eliminates manual testing delays and accelerates time-to-market, with the SOASTA TouchTest offering

- Continuous performance testing at speed and scale through SOASTA’s patented CloudTest federates millions of cloud-based servers from every major cloud provider

- Access to hundreds of real mobile devices through the cloud for testing at every phase of mobile development, with SOASTA Mobile Device Cloud

- Real User Monitoring (RUM) validates each user experience in real time and correlate real user activity to business metrics through performance analytics, with SOASTA mPulse

“Enterprise mobile application developers will hugely benefit from the partnership between SOASTA and Kony, with the best end-to-end solution to create apps that will perform at the most optimal level,” said Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA. “SOASTA customers are committed to providing the highest level of user experience. Now, Kony customers can also rely on the same market-leading performance analytics to optimize their mobile and Web platforms.

Key benefits of the new end-to-end DevOps platform:

Agility

- Continuous test integration and agile delivery enables the business to respond to market and competitive change

- Reuse code and backend APIs across apps, digital channels and form factors

- Leverage the cloud to instantly build, provision, test and scale mobile apps and infrastructure

- Keep up with the rapid pace of new devices, versions, OSs and form factors as they are released

Usability

- Use powerful analytics to drive insights, iteration and perfect the UX/UI

- Accelerate performance by analyzing all the real user data in real time in a single pane for quick and accurate insights

- Create visually rich, device-exploiting apps in record time using collaborative WYSIWYM (“what you see is what you get”) design tools

Certainty

- Guarantee compatibility across a constantly changing device landscape with unmatched 30-day service level agreement (SLA) on new OS updates

- Ensure a mobile app scales in line with the growth of your customers and business

- Define smart, context-aware policies to secure your enterprise apps and ensure data integrity and availability

- Reuse, Integrate and extend high-value LOB processes to mobile users with powerful backend mobile infrastructure

Efficiency

- Ability to automate functional test cases against a variety of devices and form factors

- Significantly reduce quality assurance cycles

- Create proactive testing plans letting enterprises know of problems before their customers do