Mobile Labs
Helping to Deliver High-Performance Mobile Apps

Don Addington, President and CEO of MobileLabs has had the privilege of being a part of three general technology revolutions in his career, working through the paradigms as they have shifted from mainframe to web to mobile. 'The multiplicity of devices, operating systems, and form factors have wrested away the control that enterprises once had over their target environments,' he says. Most of these control problems faced by the organizations can be solved by 'strategic private clouds' that will let customers benefit from public clouds while protecting key corporate assets. Mobile Labs helps companies in the mobile testing sphere overcome the problems of sharing, managing, and scheduling their pool of mobile devices with appropriate solutions.

Mobile Labs is an HP Gold Business Partner that provides enterprise-grade, next generation testing tools for mobile app, device and mobile website testing. The company focuses on security, agility and affordability, and manages mobile devices and test device access in a private and secure cloud. “These companies especially need help with continuous integration and automated test initiation, which are the building blocks of mobile development and operation technology,” notes Addington. With a private mobile device cloud in place, organizations can use their existing tools in the mobile space with increased productivity. It also solves concerns about data and application security. “Our private mobile device cloud, deviceConnect, makes real mobile devices available in secure fashion, anywhere from a customer’s worldwide infrastructure,” adds Addington.

For deviceConnect, the company supplies a custom cabinet that holds and charges up to 48 mobile devices; a server in the cabinet connects to the customer’s LAN. The server offers comprehensive sharing and management of the attached devices; sessions can be established for manual or automated testing from a remote desktop.

Users are authenticated and can schedule future device access when they need it. “We provide ‘all the comforts of home’ with the bonus of support for real mobile devices. That means we support the full range of tools and scenarios including the object repository, record and play, full object-based scripting, run results reporting, test management, load testing, and network virtualization that are delivered by other facets of the HP suite,” explains Addington.

The name, Mobile Labs, is aspirational for solving challenges that mobility brings to the enterprise. The company is invigorated to solve problems of “mobility-everything.” Recently, a large multinational bank with testers in the U.S. and overseas benefitted from Mobile Labs solution. deviceConnect allowed the bank to take advantage of the security and performance of LAN-attached mobile devices, protected through VPN and the corporate firewall, which were accessible to the management and could be shared across continents. “With functionalities like this, deviceConnectis quickly becoming a key component of the testing and development infrastructure,” claims Addington.

“deviceConnect delivers secure, easy-to-use support that makes the differences for a client, as the product is a private device cloud. Competitive, public cloud offerings can face challenges with performance, security, and the ability to ‘test your way’ that deviceConnect can solve,” shares Addington.

deviceConnect is foundational and Mobile Labs has started a “meteoric” rise as they have sharply increased revenues every quarter and are seeing a lot of renewals and additional business within existing customers. “For possibly the first time in the history of data and applications, the makers have little or no say in the matter –enterprises have to move to mobility, seemingly instantly, and the expectations out there are very high. What we at Mobile Labs hope to do is to help enterprises be productive and efficient through this amazingly accelerated transformation into mobility,” concludes Addington.