Vendor Analysis
published on Aug 15, 2017
Report Overview:
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes Applause's offerings and capabilities in crowdtesting.
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s Software Testing Vendor Assessment for Applause is a comprehensive assessment of Applause’s crowdtesting 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 crowdtesting 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, formerly known as uTest, was founded in 2007. The Framingham, MA (U.S.) headquartered company is a pioneer in crowdtesting.
Applause started its crowdtesting activities by providing (manual) functional testing, initially targeting start-ups. Through the economic downturn, Applause gained contracts with well-known clients such as Microsoft and Google, by offering a lower-cost alternative to traditional testing. These client references helped it to expand its client base to large enterprises.
In 2014, the company (then named uTest) restructured into two brands and operating units: the parent company and client-facing brand was renamed Applause (after an IP that it had developed to measure and analyze sentiment from app users/app store). The company retained the uTest brand for its community of testers, which it relaunched in 2014.With this rebranding, Applause wanted to show that it provides morethan testing services, i.e. also customer experience and sentiment feedback.
In 2016, Applause completed a round of funding totaling $35m, to fund its service portfolio expansion towards omni-channel experience, feedback, and research, as well as potential M&As. In total, Applause has raised $115m in venture funding since its inception.
Applause has a network of 300k testers in 200 geographies globally, serving ~3k clients. It services mostly large enterprises (these make up 70% of its client base, in terms of revenues, with start-ups and smaller firms representing 30%).
Its client base includes mostly B2C organizations. Key sectors include retail and software products/technology (including video games). Other important sectors are BFSI, restaurants and hospitality, travel, higher education, healthcare, and media.
Applause’s testing scope is primarily mobile apps and websites (50% of its testing activity is around native mobile apps and 50% is around websites, connected devices, IoT apps and devices, mobile websites and desktop applications).