DEVOPSdigest

SmartBear Software has acquired CrossBrowserTesting, one of the fastest growing automated cloud testing platforms.

The acquisition enables CrossBrowserTesting to further accelerate and scale its rapidly growing Web and mobile cloud testing offering using SmartBear’s global resources.

CrossBrowserTesting has more than 200,000 users globally. With more than 5 million tests run so far, CrossBrowserTesting provides a highly secured, scalable and flexible cloud containing more than 1,500 mobile and desktop browsers in more than 65 operating systems, including iOS, Android and Windows. CrossBrowserTesting will continue to operate as a standalone business inside SmartBear.

“CrossBrowserTesting offers customers an easy way to use a cloud service for testing applications written for browsers and real mobile devices,” said Doug McNary, CEO of SmartBear. “It has continued to win the trust of customers by building a reliable, affordable and easy-to-use automated testing cloud platform. SmartBear intends to maintain CrossBrowserTesting as a standalone service, while providing the resources and investments necessary to help CrossBrowserTesting build a bigger and better business much faster.”

CrossBrowserTesting helps Agile development teams and QA teams to eliminate the cost, time and effort traditionally involved with creating and maintaining in-house testing infrastructure for mobile and desktop browser applications. The CrossBrowserTesting cloud infrastructure is highly secured and can be provisioned quickly on an as-needed basis. It improves testing efficiency and test coverage by providing teams instant and easy access to a variety of real mobile devices and browsers across diverse OS platforms. Teams, for instance, can run manual as well as automated tests created with popular open source tools like Selenium and Appium through a combination of more than 1,500 browser, OS, device and platform combinations. Additionally, teams can use visual comparisons to deliver a consistent UI experience and identify page layout issues across different browsers and mobile devices having different sizes and resolutions.

“When we started CrossBrowserTesting eight years ago, we wanted to do something big in the software testing space,” said Ken Hamric, co-founder at CrossBrowserTesting. “SmartBear provides the perfect environment to scale the business and increase adoption. SmartBear’s tremendous resources, strong track record in software testing and its experience in low touch, high volume business are perfectly aligned to make that vision a reality. Our cultures align nicely around providing a great value for the IT dollar. Joining SmartBear will give us quick access to the resources and technology we need to innovate and accelerate the product development process, enabling us to take CrossBrowserTesting to new heights.”

CrossBrowserTesting adds a cloud testing platform to SmartBear’s award winning collection of products for developers, testers and IT operations professionals. The acquisition in particular will be a strong complement to SmartBear’s existing testing tool portfolio. Over time, the acquisition opens up a slew of new capabilities for SmartBear’s customers, as they will be able to overcome test environment management challenges, along with speeding up test creation and maintenance through existing SmartBear testing tools. Additionally, the support for Selenium and Appium in CrossBrowserTesting aligns perfectly with SmartBear’s vision of providing more value through open source tools. SmartBear’s support for Selenium project and its open source offering SoapUI are testament to that fact.

“CrossBrowserTesting brings new value to the SmartBear testing tool portfolio,” said Carl Lehmann, Research Manager at 451 Research. “The support for Selenium and Appium in CrossBrowserTesting should strengthen SmartBear’s position among the open source Web and mobile testing markets.”

All CrossBrowserTesting employees, including co-founders Ken Hamric, Tony Colston and Mike Bowen, have joined SmartBear to continue to grow the CrossBrowserTesting product and business. The Memphis location will continue to serve as headquarters of CrossBrowserTesting for future expansion.