BrowserStack’s mission is to make developer’s lives easier. With a cloud-based app and browser testing platform, they eliminate testing’s biggest pain points and help enterprises deliver bug-free websites and mobile applications faster than ever before. They have over 25,000 customers, including industry leaders like Microsoft, Twitter, Spotify, Verizon, ESPN, Warner Media, RBS, Barclays, Mastercard and Expedia. Now with our partnership, the QBS Distribution network of resellers selling developer tools across Europe can help their customers deliver awesome website and mobile application experiences.
After putting pen to paper on the new contract we spoke with Varun Gupta, Head of Growth and Business Operations, from BrowserStack about the market opportunity for BrowserStack’s technology.
So, tell us a little more about BrowserStack?
BrowserStack was founded in 2011. Our founders Ritesh and Nakul were developers themselves. They realised that testing their websites for compatibility across different devices, operating systems, and browsers, especially Internet Explorer—the leading browser at the time, was a big pain. Digging a bit deeper they realised that the problem was not theirs alone and that developers everywhere faced similar struggles with compatibility testing. This realisation is what led to the birth of BrowserStack.
BrowserStack is the world’s leading cloud-based web and mobile testing platform. Customers get instant access to our state-of-the-art test infrastructure to perform live interactive testing, Selenium automation testing, mobile app testing, and automated app testing. BrowserStack’s cloud-based products have become the de-facto standard for testing. What started with just two people working out of a coffee shop has now grown into a 350+ strong global team working out of three continents. As BrowserStack continues to evolve, we are committed to making the lives of developers and QAs easier across the world. For this, we have data centres across 8 locations globally.
After being bootstrapped for the first six years, in early 2018, BrowserStack raised a Series A from Accel Partners.
We see the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Twitter are customers. That’s pretty impressive, could you explain how they use your technology?
The core of BrowserStack’s value proposition is providing the ability to test your web and mobile applications across thousands of real browsers and devices at a single click. When you build a website or mobile application you want to ensure that it works seamlessly on all platforms where your users might be present. This means testing your applications on different browsers and browser versions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer and so on), different mobile devices (Apple, Samsung, Google, OnePlus) and different screen sizes. Before BrowserStack, teams would have to maintain their own labs with thousands of different devices to cover all the possible combinations highlighted above. However, maintaining a device lab is not simple – you are constantly struggling with device malfunction, network outages, software upgrades, new model launches and the list goes on. Instead of writing and testing code, teams would have to waste time, effort and money just to ensure that their basic infrastructure works.
BrowserStack takes all that hassle out of your life. Through our platform, developers and testers can access 2000+ real browsers and devices at the click of a button, so they can focus on doing what they do best – building awesome applications. And, this is such a fundamental use case that not only tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Twitter but even companies as diverse as RBS, Barclays, Adidas, Discovery, Lego and Expedia are all our customers.
When talking with customers, what’s driving their interest?
10 years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg said “Move fast and break things”, software developers did exactly that. And it worked, until a certain point. Beyond a certain point of product maturity, breaking things lead to business loss.
As product usage grows, any bug in the product affects a much larger proportion of users. Since competition among products is much higher now, users are more likely to abandon a website or app at the first sign of malfunction. They certainly have many more options to choose from now than ever before in history.
This means that product quality on production is now critical. A minor oversight can and does lead to millions of dollars in losses. For example, a deployment error resulted in a $460M loss for American financial firm Knight Capital Group. We now live in a world where you have to move fast and not break things.
BrowserStack’s testing infrastructure helps customers deliver software with uncompromising quality at scale. We have established a testing ecosystem that aligns with DevOps practices so as to enable continuous deployment of pristine code into production.
What benefits are users seeing from utilising BrowserStack technologies?
Companies that win have one thing in common – they move fast. For example, Amazon and Netflix deploy code to production 1000s of times per day. Adidas deploys to 50 global markets daily. These levels are not possible to maintain without access to a testing landscape that is highly robust and set up to make developers’ lives easier.
Our cloud-based automated testing infrastructure ensures that tests that previously took hours or days to set up and finish are now accomplished in minutes. This not only translates into massive gains in developer and QA productivity but helps our customers stay ahead of the competition by releasing new features and bug fixes at lightning fast speed.
To know more about how BrowserStack empowers clients to deliver quality at speed, have a look at the customer stories on our website.
Why do you think developers favour BrowserStack for testing?
There are a range of features which make BrowserStack the developers’ choice for meeting their testing needs. No other testing platform out there comes close to BrowserStack in terms of offering such a powerful combination of reliability, speed and security. To begin with, we are the industry’s most reliable testing infrastructure with 99% up-time. We have 8 data centres across the world to ensure low latency and fast performance. We follow the most rigorous security practices and are SOC2 Type II compliant.
In addition, getting started is as easy as plug and play – once you sign up, you can start running tests immediately. Users can reuse Selenium test suites since we support all major languages and frameworks. We help integrate effortlessly with the tester’s CI/CD pipeline. They can also i
ntegrate with other tools that may be used by their teams such as Jira and Slack. Lastly, we provide a rich debugging toolset that covers everything a tester might need to troubleshoot tests that do not.
Our platform and features are all geared towards making the life of QAs and developers as easy as possible. We provide an unmatched combination of speed, security, reliability, ease of use and functionality and that is why our customers find our services so useful for their day to day testing.
For all the reseller account managers selling developer tools within our network of resellers. What are your top tips for selling BrowserStack?
My first tip would be to invest some time in becoming familiar with the products in the beginning. There are so many great features that learning them all takes a bit of practice. However, once you know the products in an out selling them becomes so much easier.
The other tip would be to work with customers to understand their requirements and pain points. BrowserStack provides a wide-ranging solution to multiple problems in the software testing ecosystem. It is a platform built by developers, for developers. It is meant to serve developers’ needs, so emphasise that as much as possible.