Boston-based SmartBear has signed up David Phillips as its new senior vice president of customer retention and technical sales engineering.
The appointment comes as the software testing firm recently rolled out a number of new solutions amid an increased focus on pushing into the North American QA space.
Philips, who has roughly two decades of experience in leading and building sales teams, comes from 3Play Media where he was senior vice president of sales and customer success.
He will focus on strategies to address customer needs, provide ongoing support, and help customers to solve problems.
Melissa Campbell, SmartBear’s chief revenue officer, stressed Philip’s “deep understanding of the customer journey” and singled out his proven track record in customer retention.
“In today’s AI-driven software development landscape, Philip’s expertise focused on growth, accountability, and results will be invaluable,” she said.
Previously, he was chief revenue officer at Alyce where he helped sales and marketing teams to create meaningful connections with their prospects, customers, and partners through corporate gifting.
“In today’s competitive environment, companies that effectively demonstrate value and differentiation cultivate long-term, mutually beneficial relationships,” said David Phillips, commenting on his new role.
“As a leader, I have always been dedicated to building a culture of success which fuels performance,” he stated.
Back-end monitoring
The appointment of Philips comes only a week after SmartBear rolled out a new solution that allows back-end performance monitoring and distributed tracing.
The new platform, called BugSnag, includes OpenTelemetry-native performance insights and distributed tracing as part of its error and real user monitoring solution.
“This new functionality empowers developers to proactively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks and systemic issues with a truly comprehensive view of application performance, increasing responsiveness and enhancing overall customer experience,” explained Justin Collier, senior director of product management at SmartBear.
“These new capabilities are valuable for enterprises with highly critical applications and those that prioritize delivering exceptional user experiences, especially on mobile and other front-end platforms where quality of interaction is critical,” Collier added.
In fact, “in today’s complex, distributed environments, ensuring seamless performance across all layers of the application stack has become progressively challenging. By tracing issues from the user’s application all the way through to distributed systems and tying everything together, BugSnag provides a thorough view of an application’s performance,” Colliers elaborated.
The product is expected to be taken up by a range of banks and financial services firms as they are increasingly turning to sophisticated applications, embedded in their digital infrastructure.
Colliers was keen to point out that “with distributed tracing integrated into performance monitoring, developers have a much more detailed view of system performance.”
Asked to scrutinise SmartBear’s new platform, Stephen Elliot, group vice president, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps at IDC, commented that “observability, reliability, and software quality are now C-Suite concerns as unplanned downtime can wreak havoc on a company’s reputation and revenue streams.”
He added: “It’s now essential that development executives have complete transparency into their digital services and understand what their customers are truly experiencing.”
Finserv testing market
The BugSnag launch comes as SmartBear is aggressively targeting the financial services-focused software testing market, particularly in its home market, the US.
It recently launched a new test management platform. The standout feature, according to the firm, is its no-code test automation capabilities.
SmartBear said the Jira-native platform, which has been released on the Atlassian marketplace, should streamline software quality by enabling developers to turn manual tests into automated runs without any new or additional coding.
The platform, called Zephyr Scale, with an extension named Zephyr Scale Automate, is capable of running cross-browser tests, email and SMS testing, as well as parallel
SmartBear’s Dan Faulkner explained that the new solution “extends test automation to all.”
When asked to elaborate, he said that the platform “enables a step-change in test automation to speed up releases and free up capacity in testing teams.”
This means that any need for scripts is removed, allowing manual testers to design and use their own automated tests.
Faulkner disclosed that, during a two-month beta program close to 2,000 testers tried to platform by completing just over 28,000 test runs.
The platform’s name comes from Zephyr, a competitor deeply embedded in the Atlassian marketplace that was bought by SmartBear in 2018.
The Massachusetts-based technology specialist also said the new solution was a direct result of the company’s recent acquisition of rival firm Reflect.
“With our strategic acquisition of advanced AI-powered provider Reflect just months ago, we are pioneering a groundbreaking approach in test automation,” explained Faulkner.
In February, as reported by QA Financial, SmartBear acquired the AI-driven no-code testing platform called Reflect in a strategic move to strengthen the company’s GenAI capabilities.
The testing solution for web applications allows developers and testers to write tests faster as text prompts, enabling greater automation.
Prior to the acquisition, Reflect was owned by Battery Ventures, Craft Ventures, and Y Combinator. Financial details were never disclosed.
AI approach
Faulkner pointed out that the Reflect acquisition accelerates SmartBear’s AI strategy to meet diverse customer needs by intelligently powering the firm’s three integrated hubs “for API development, testing, and production readiness with insights that power great user experiences across the entire software development lifecycle.”
In addition, he stressed it is in the process of realigning around 20 products into “intuitive solution hubs,” including its Test Hub, to simplify the customer experience.
The Test Hub allows testers to manage, automate, and execute all tests in one place to guarantee app quality.
Faulkner called his firm’s approach “groundbreaking in test automation” as it “removes barriers such as lack of time, technical expertise, and resources, allowing for complete traceability in the testing process.” Testing codes are being created more quickly and with less human oversight.”
Singling out Zephyr, one of SmartBear’s best-selling testing solutions, Faulkner claimed that “Zephyr Scale saves 40+ hours per month on average per user” because its “reporting capabilities allow testers to generate customisable reports and metrics to track testing progress, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions.”
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