Just in case readers hadn’t heard, mobile applications are all the rage today. Both consumer and enterprise users are demanding to be able to interact with data whenever and wherever they want. increasingly this means from a mobile device. Alongside this increasing importance of mobile applications, there is a burgeoning number of vendors creating tools to meet the needs of mobile application creators. And where there is lots of startup activity invariably there is a frothy investment scene and this is certainly the case in the mobile application space.
Proof of this today from Perfecto Mobile who is announcing a $20M Series D funding round from new investor FTV Capital, with continued participation from existing investors Carmel, Vertex and Globespan Capital Partners. Perfecto Mobile is the company behind the MobileCloud Platform, an end-to-end mobile quality product suite that allows users to remotely access a large selection of real mobile devices connected to local cellular networks around the world and leverage them throughout the mobile application delivery lifecycle – from development, functional and performance testing to monitoring and support.Via either an enterprise private cloud or a sharable public cloud environment, MobileCloud allows application creators to get a real perspective on how their applications perform across devices, carriers and geographies.
Perfecto Mobile boasts of more than 1,000 customers, including 100 of the Fortune 1000 companies and has customers across the banking, insurance, retail, telecommunications and media industries. Initial customers include Weight Watchers,
Clearly mobile application testing and associated services are a massively important area given the rise of mobile computing – we’ve seen a plethora of Mobile Backend as a Service vendors rise and some M&A activity with Facebook’s acquisition of Parse being a good example. Now more peripheral mobile application tools are coming to prominence. Says Melina-Carol Ballo, analyst at IDC:
The need for a mobile app quality strategy is imperative because enterprises’ reputations today are closely tied and, in most cases, highly dependent on strong mobile apps. The need is creating a fast-growing market seeking a solution that directly addresses the quality of mobile apps. The goal of speeding up app delivery without compromising quality across today’s wide range of devices requires a mobile app quality platform that enables distributed teams to share real devices, run cross-platform automated tests and integrate into their existing SDLC tools and workflow
Of course there is also likely to be some consolidation and rationalization in the space – Perfecto’s product lends itself to being an integral part of one of the mobile development platforms and this is something we’re likely to see over time. The key task for Perfecto now is to gain some momentum such that they get noticed by a potential acquirer – while at the same time making sure the economics of their funding and business as a whole doesn’t put any barriers to acquisition in place. it will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Either way, Perfecto is justified in saying that the investment signifies the emergence of mobile application quality as a rapidly growing and critical space .
