InfoStretch has featured in this week’s The Hindu Business Line
Please read the article here:
InfoStretch to raise headcount To tap emerging market in mobile testing, applications.
The US-headquartered InfoStretch Solutions, which launched the India Mobile Device Cloud in June, is increasing its workforcefive times in the next three years to tap into the emerging market in mobile testing and applications, worth $USD 31 billion, globally. A customer can use any cloud-enabled mobile phone, or prevent its misuse, from a computer anywhere in the world even if he does not actually physically possess. Moreover, the customer need not regularly upgrade his cellular phone to avail himself of the different services being added.
Smart shift
According to a Gartner report, most of the mobile phones in the world would be smart phones by 2013. “In India, about 15-20 per cent of all mobile phones, out of the current 600 million, added by 15-20 million annually, will be high-end smart phones,” Mr Ashok Karania, Head, Business Strategy, InfoStretch, told Business Line here. With this emerging market scenario, InfoStretch plans to increase its current strength of 300, in the US and India, to 1,500. Besides, InfoStretch is starting operations in Europe, Canada and Singapore, and looking for partners elsewhere. At present, InfoStretch has workstations at Santa Clara, New York, Seattle and Mumbai, besides Ahmedabad.
Cloud in India
India is only the sixth country in the world to have the Perfecto device cloud, after the US, the UK, Canada, France and Israel. InfoStretch was instrumental in bringing and managing the mobile cloud to India, he said. After the US-based Device Anywhere, InfoStretch is the only company in the world to provide such solutions that enable different kinds of mobile phones with varied specifications to come on a common platform to share common services.
He said the software testing market, globally, is seen at $13 billion in the next two years. This would include mobile testing market of $4-5 billion. Similarly, the global mobile applications market would be $18 billion, including $5 billion for India-based companies providing services abroad. Of this, about 5-10 per cent market will also be the Indian domestic market. In June this year, InfoStretch had added Indian devices and carriers to Perfecto Mobile’s global remote testing network to facilitate remote testing of applications on these devices and carriers.
InfoStretch, which provides mobile testing and certification services and customised mobile development, through its India Mobile Device Cloud, seeks to make Indian handsets and networks available to the global community of mobile developers and content providers. It also offered Indian developers access to the global network of remote devices. By combining its testing expertise, automation framework and global reach with Perfecto Mobile’s automated testing and remote device access technology, InfoStretch offered an end-to-end solution for a wide-range of testing needs through a single source. The system provides a Web-based user-interface through which the mobile community can use any handset in the same way a real-life user would, through its keys, touch-screen, or QWERTY keyboard, to validate that the handset and its applications work properly.
The system allows mobile telephone developers to test on real mobile devices without having to physically obtain them, on multiple devices and geographies, including India, on a variety of device models and OS versions, access the latest and popular handsets, showcase their mobile application by taking screenshots and video clips and run automated tests across multiple handsets. It provides for automated solutions as well, through which users will be able to install applications on handsets, automatically send SMS and email messages to the device under test and compare how their mobile Web pages are displayed on different phones.
The Indian mobile community could now access more than 1,800 mobile handsets at a click of a button, Mr Karania, said, adding his company also provides dedicated private handset cloud systems for mobile operators, handset manufacturers, and independent software vendors. InfoStretch services are being procured by leading VAS providers, mobile development and gaming companies, media houses, and others to improve the quality of their mobile offering.
Source: The Hindu Business Line
