MWC: Alcatel-Lucent, DeviceAnywhere speed mobile app testing

Alcatel-Lucent will continue its focus on helping developers better work with mobile operators to deliver mobile apps, launching at next week’s Mobile World Congress event a partnership with mobile testing firm DeviceAnywhere.

The partnership integrates Alcatel-Lucent’s Developer Platform and DeviceAnywhere’s TestCenter to let developers test and certify their apps on multiple devices and multiple live carrier networks – all remotely “from the cloud.”

Using the service, developers can remotely test their apps rather than being forced to physically travel to service provider app testing houses – a boon to startup developers that may not have the resources to make such trips and want to release their apps as quickly, and painlessly, as possible.

Testing across multiple devices can typically be done at the SDK level using emulators. But for developers that also want to add operator (and in some cases multiple operator) APIs or services to their apps, the testing and certification process can become exponentially more challenging.

For service providers wanting to open and manage their own app stores, application submission and certification can represent a major stumbling block when competing with more software-centric players like Google or Apple. Operators can adopt the joint ALU/DeviceAnywhere solution as the front-end to their app store submission process, essentially getting “certification-in-a-box” –or rather “–from-the-cloud” – capabilities almost instantaneously, the companies said.

Alcatel-Lucent has been rolling out a series of cloud-based services and resources to help mobile operators as a major part of its application enablement focus.

The two companies will demonstrate the integrated solution at Mobile World Congress next week.

DeviceAnywhere said its Test Center platform currently supports more than 2,000 devices on over 28 different carrier networks worldwide.