Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how the “mobile first” movement is making the cloud more attractive for software developers.

1. Perfecto Mobile Goes to Cloud-Based Testing Tools so
Developers Can Build the Best Mobile Apps Fast
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how the “mobile first” movement is making
the cloud more attractive for software developers.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact
on people’s lives.
Gardner
Once again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, and business
results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013
Conference in Barcelona.
We’re here the week of December 9 to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big
data, mobile, and cloud, along with converged infrastructure are all supporting their goals.
Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Perfecto Mobile is using a variety of
cloud-based testing tools to help its developers create the best mobile apps for enterprises and for
commercial developers as well.
So join me in welcoming our guest. We’re here with Yoram Mizrachi. He is the CTO and
Founder of Perfecto Mobile based in Woburn, Massachusetts. Welcome Yoram.
Yoram Mizrachi: Hi. Thank you.
Gardner: First, tell us a little bit about the state of the mobile development market. How fast is
it growing and who are building mobile apps these days?
Mizrachi: Everyone is building mobile applications today. We have not gone
into a single company that doesn’t have anything on mobile. It’s like what
happened on the web 15 years ago. Mobile is moving fast. Even today, we have
customers with more transactions on mobile than any other channel that they’re
offering, including web or making calls. Mobile is here.
Mizrachi
Gardner: So that’s a big challenge for companies that perhaps are used to a
development cycle that took a lot longer, where they had more time to do testing
and quality assurance. Mobile development seems to be speeded up. Is there a time crunch that
they’re concerned about?

2. Mizrachi: Absolutely. In mobile there are two factors that come into play. The first one is that
everyone today is expecting things to happen much faster. So everyone is talking about agile and
DevOps, and crunching the time for a version from a few months, maybe even a year, into few
weeks.
Bigger problem
With mobile, there’s a bigger problem. The market itself is moving faster. Looking at the
mobile market, you see hundreds of mobile models being launched every year. Apple is releasing
many models. Android is releasing tremendous amount of new models every year. The challenge
for enterprises is how to release faster on one side, but still maintain a decent quality on all the
wide ranges of devices available.
Gardner: So that’s a big challenge in terms of coming up with a test environment for each of
those iterations.
Of course, we’re also seeing mobile first, where they’re going to build mobile, and it's
changing the whole nature of development. It's a very dynamic and busy time for
developers and enterprises. Tell us about Perfecto Mobile and how you’re helping
them to manage these difficult times.
Mizrachi: Yes, it is mobile first. Many of our existing customers, as I mentioned, have more
transactions on mobile than anything else. Today, they’re building an interface for their
customers starting from mobile. This means there are tremendous issues that they need to handle,
starting with automation. If automation was nice to have on traditional web, with mobile it’s no
longer a question. Building a robust and continuous automated testing environment is a must in
mobile.
Gardner: Now, we’re talking about not only different targets for mobile, but we’re talking about
different types of applications. There’s Android, Apple, native, Web, hybrid. How wide a
landscape of types of apps are you supporting with your testing capabilities?
Mizrachi: When you look at the market today, mobile is moving very fast, and you’re right,
there are lots of solutions available in the market. One of the things that Perfecto Mobile is
bringing to the market is the fact that we support them all. We support native, hybrid
applications, Web services, iOS, Android, and any other platform. All of this is provided as a
cloud service. We enable our customers to worry a little bit less about the environment and a
little bit more about the actual testing.
Gardner: Tell us how you’re doing this? I know that you are a software-as-a-service (SaaS)
provider and that the testing that you provide is through a cloud-based model. A lot of
organizations have traditionally done their own testing or used some tools that may have been

3. SaaS provided. How are companies viewing going purely to a SaaS model for their testing with
their mobile apps?
Mizrachi: The nice thing about what we do with cloud is that it solves a huge logistical problem
for the enterprises. We’re providing managed solution for those physical devices. So it’s many
things.
One of them is just physically managing those devices and enabling access to them from
anywhere in the world. For example, if I’m a U.S.-based company, I can have my workforce and
my testing, located anywhere in the world without the need to worry about the logistics of
managing devices, offshoring, or anything like that. Our customers are utilizing this cloud model
to not change their existing processes when moving into mobile.
ALM integration
Gardner: And in order to be able to use cloud amid a larger application lifecycle, you must
also offer application lifecycle management (ALM) or at least integrate with ALM, source code
management, and other aspects of development. How does that work?
Mizrachi: Our approach was to not reinvent the wheel. When looking at the large enterprises,
we figured out that the existing ALM solutions in the market, of course led by HP, is there, and
the right approach is to integrate or to extend them into mobile and not to replace them.
What we have is an extension to the ALM products in such a way that you, as a customer, don’t
have to change your existing processes and practices in order to move to mobile. You’ll have a
lot of issues when moving into mobile, and we don’t believe that changing the processes should
be one of them.
Gardner: Of course HP having with some 65 percent of the market for ALM and a major market
presence for a lot of other testing and business service management capabilities, it was a nobrainer for you to have to integrate to HP. But you’ve gone beyond that. You’re using HP
yourself for your own testing. Tell us how you came to do that.
Mizrachi: HP has the largest market in ALM, and looking at our customers in Fortune 500
companies, it was really obvious that we needed to utilize, integrate, or extend HP ALM tools in
order to provide a market with the best solution.
Internally, of course, we’re using the HP suites, including Unified Functional Testing (UFT)
Performance Center, and Load Runner in order to manage our own development.
Gardner: Tell me a little bit more about what your users are getting as a result of going to
Perfecto Mobile and using a SaaS-based approach to testing for the mobile devices? Do you have
any metrics of success or even an example of how this works, so that we can appreciate how this
is a better way to do it?

4. Mizrachi: Absolutely. One of the things I’m quite proud of is that we, as a company, have proofs
of success in the market, with hundreds of customers already using us and tens of thousands of
hours of automation every month being utilized.
We have customers with thousands of automated scripts running continuously in order to validate
the application. It's a competitive environment, obviously, but with Perfecto Mobile, the value
that we’re bringing to the table is that we have a proven solution today used by the largest
Fortune 500 companies in finance, retail, travel, utilities, and they have been using us not for
months, but for years.
Gardner: Where do you see this going next? Is there a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) opportunity
where we’re going to do not just testing but development and deployment ultimately? If you are
in the cloud for more and more of what you do in development and deployment, it makes sense
to try to solidify and unify across a cloud from start to finish.
Mizrachi: I’m obviously a little bit biased, but, yes, my belief is that the software development
life cycle (SDLC) is moving to the cloud. If you want to go ahead, you don’t really have a
choice. One of the major failures in SDLC is setup of the environment. If you don’t have the
right environment, just in time, you will fail to deliver regardless of the tool that you have.
Just in time
Moving to the cloud means that you have everything that you need just in time. It's available
for you. Someone has to make sure this solution is available with a given service-level agreement
(SLA) and all of that. This is what Perfecto Mobile is doing of course, but I believe the entire
market is going into that. Software development is moving to the cloud. This is quite obvious.
Gardner: One other area of course concerning the cloud is security, particularly around
intellectual property like code. Are you and HP working together to try to ameliorate any
concerns? How do you answer questions about security?
Mizrachi: For our customers, the top insurance and top financial banks customers, healthcare
organizations, all of them, security is extremely important, and of course it is for us. Our hosting
solution is a SOC 2-certified solution. We have dedicated personnel for security and we make
sure that our customers enjoy the highest level of privacy and, of course, security -- physical
security, network security, and all the tools and processes in place.
Gardner: And, as we know, HP has been doing testing in the cloud successfully for more than
10 years and moving aggressively in that space early on.
Mizrachi: We’re enjoying the fact that our R and D Center and HP and D Center are close by. So
the development of the two products is very close. We have weekly or biweekly meetings

5. between products and R and D teams in order to make sure that those two tools are moving
together.
Gardner: One last area before we end our discussion. You’re going beyond just testing. You’re
using Business Service Management (BSM) and the monitoring is ongoing. As we all know with
application development, and mobile in particular, you’re never really done. It's an ongoing
process, a lifecycle. Tell us about the monitoring aspect and how you’re helping organizations
keep those applications, those mobile apps, up to speed and up to spec, but also ready for the
new operating systems and platforms that they will have to perform with.
Mizrachi: SDLC, as you mentioned, is a lifecycle. It's not only about one time testing; it's
ongoing. And post-deployment, when moving into production, you need to see that what you’re
offering to the market on the real device is actually what you expect. That’s extremely important.
As the mobile market matures, organization are relying more on mobile to assure and increase
their revenue. So making sure the mobile offering is up and running and meets the right key
performance indicators (KPIs) on an ongoing basis is extremely important. The integration that
we’ve made with BSM is utilizing an existing extremely mature product on the monitoring
aspect and extending that with cloud-based real mobile devices for application monitoring.
Gardner: Well, very good. We’ll have to leave it there, I am afraid. We’ve been talking about
how the Perfecto Mobile organization has been delivering application testing for mobile
development through a cloud-based system and relying heavily on the HP performance and test
suite to do so.
I would like to thank our guest, Yoram Mizrachi, the CTO and Founder of Perfecto Mobile.
Thanks so much.
Mizrachi: Thank you very much.
Gardner: And thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of IT
discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how the “mobile first” movement is making
the cloud more attractive for software developers. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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