SOASTA, a consultancy that specializes in helping enterprises test their cloud applications, is expanding its horizons. The company announced the launch of its Mobile Services Division (MSD) today, a new business group headed by Mahesh Gidwani. The executive has a strong Silicon Valley background, including plenty of experience in the mobile testing and big data verticals.

“The explosion of mobile development has created a capability gap in the services market that SOASTA uniquely fills with our elite team of experts and partners who have pioneered mobile test automation and cloud testing,” said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO. “We launched the SOASTA Mobile Services Division after our customers told us that they often lacked the expertise to implement and execute effective mobile and cloud-based testing strategies.”

With the launch, SOASTA is introducing a complete mobile services portfolio that spans strategy, implementation, ad-hoc, optimization and accreditation. The latter is the big enabler behind the Mobile Test Automation Network, which consists of professionals from around the world who are certified to deliver SOASTA’s homegrown testing methodologies.

App development and mobile are two huge markets that are drawing the attention of the entire industry, from niche firms such as SOASTA to the big name vendors.  Database giant Oracle acquired a minority stake in Engine Yard this week. The firm is known for its widely-used PaaS platform, which supports applications written in Ruby, PHP and Node.js. The latter is the newest of the three, but it’s quickly picking up momentum thanks to its server-side performance  and convenient syntax.

Also this week, EMC integrated its Syncplicity file sharing platform with SlideShark, a popular iOS app for PowerPoint presentations. This native support allows users to keep their files on EMC’s cloud and access them at any time from SlideShark, which complements this accessibility with functionality of its own.