Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA, discussed performance testing in the age of web and mobile apps with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier, live at the O’Reilly Velocity conference in Santa Clara.

Commenting on the conference, Lounibos pointed out that it’s mostly about developers, not marketing messages. There was “not a lot of hype, there is a lot of conversation about fixing problems,” Lounibos notes.

Talking about SOASTA’s experience with web performance testing, Lounibos said the company started looking at web and mobile performance in the early days, ten years ago when there was a big difference in web and mobile apps, mostly about scale, agility, and performance. “We’re known for Quality as a Service. Our approach was to find more automation, more scale, and more affordability associated with testing mobile and web apps.” The company has over 45o business customers, some of their most famous being the Curiosity Rover, the London Olympics apps,  and currently the Russian Olympics.

Commenting on automation in testing, Lounibos said that cloud computing delivers your apps around the word. “The no. 1 problem is fragmentation,” getting an app to work well on different browsers or operating systems, as customers want a seamless app experience.

Fragmentation still an issue in app development, distribution

Currently there is an estimate of a billion websites and apps, a million and a half mobile apps, but fragmentation is going to continue to be an issue.

“The trend lines we’re seeing,” Lounibos explained, “many people are building apps that will only be used for 72 hours,” the so-called disposable apps. The London Olympics’ ticket selling app, or websites created to handle the sale of new smartphone models by large carriers.

“One of the things fundamentally changing, we’re talking about users,” Lounibos stated. There’s a difference between users and consumers.” If a site is slow, “users will stay on site and keep coming back.” Consumers, on the other hand, will just find another site. There is currently an evolution from users to consumers, and “the behavior of consumers is not as easy to deal with for the tech community right now.”

Retail is major market for the company, with an especially busy summertime season, Lounibos explained, as all major retailers are testing their apps for holidays (starting with Halloween).

• A new app cycle

For the past 20 years, the app life cycle has been dominated by the big players such as IBM or HP, he said. A life cycle includes development, testing, deployment, and management. “Right now, because of this new form of consumerism – you’re seeing a transition that has gone from bricks and mortars storefronts to ecommerce,” a shift driven by real revenue. “The battle will be who will provide the infrastructure for it,” as eCommerce is now a trillion dollar business and will increase to 10 trillion.

“There is a shift in the economy driven by mobile,” Lounibos said, adding that it has been caused major worries for CIOs eyes in the past 2 years. “The issue to make the switch is not the technology,” it’s a cultural one, especially when it comes to moving large sales teams that were used to do things a certain way.

“Quality matters more today than it’s ever mattered,” Lounibos ssaid. Consumers are always only three clicks away from a competitor. “If the site does not work, you’re done. By the time you see latency on a site, your customers are gone and they might not come back.”