Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the question that I want to explore, which is about open problems. You’ve already talked about the hyperscaling of mobile devices and apps in the next few years. If you were to start a company today, what kind of things would you work on?

Mike Ryan: I would look at how these revolutions have gone in the past, just for a little hint. Again, we look at this through the enterprise. If you go back to the days of PC, we had IT, mainframes, and customer databases. Along come personal computers, and along comes database three. All of a sudden, the company has 50 customer databases because departments went off and did things on their own. It’s the empowerment of departments in the enterprise that we think is most interesting in terms of growth.

Today you look at the market. There are several components. There’s something called in-the-wild testing where folks have people who will use your app and tell you the results and possibly give you an early look at what kind of a rating you would get from users. Those kinds of technologies today appeal maybe to startups and to folks building app store apps, or smaller organizations. The second wave of testing right now has something to do with, what I would call, batch queued execution. You submit your test to a scheduler. The scheduler runs that test in the future when the right device and the right testing framework becomes available, and returns to you some result. At the present time, that is appealing to some other startups.

Then there is device cloud-based testing where we do regression testing. Right now, the action is in IT. That’s a little bright kernel that’s sitting there and it’s about to explode. Companies can then bring technologies to the department level within big companies to empower them to do the things that they had previously depended upon IT for. Those are the things that I would be thinking about in terms of opportunity. It’s great to service these marketplaces. When you can service enterprises, you’re generally speaking of a more long-lasting customer relationship.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you very much for taking the time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs
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