Vendor Analysis
published on May 27, 2016
Report Overview:
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes Applause’s offerings and capabilities in software testing.
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s software testing vendor assessment for Applause is a comprehensive assessment of Applause’s crowd testing offerings and capabilities designed for:
- Sourcing managers monitoring the capabilities of existing suppliers of IT services and identifying vendor suitability for software testing services
- Vendor marketing, sales and business managers looking to benchmark themselves against their peers
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in the software testing sector.
Scope of this Report:
The report provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of Applause’s software testing offerings, capabilities, and market and financial strength, including:
- Analysis of the company’s offerings and key service components
- Revenue estimates
- Identification of the company’s strategy, emphasis and new developments
- Analysis of the profile of the company’s customer base including the company’s targeting strategy and examples of current contracts
- Analysis of the company’s strengths, weaknesses and outlook.
Key Findings & Highlights:
Applause is the former uTest. The company was founded in 2008, is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, and is one of the pioneers in crowd-testing.
The company started its crowd-testing activities providing (manual) functional testing initially targeting start-ups. Through the economic recession, Applause was able to gain contracts with well-known clients such as Microsoft and Google, by offering a lower-cost alternatively to traditional testing. Those client references helped the company expand its client base to large enterprises.
NelsonHall estimates revenues of Applause to be ~$70m in 2014 and to ~$100m in 2015. This makes Applause the largest of all crowd-testing vendors: its competition is fragmented landscape and includes pure-plays such as Testbirds, Mob4Hire, PassBrains, or 99tests as well as IT services vendors or testing pure-plays with a broader service scope e.g. QA Infotech.