Applause, the 360° app quality company, and Appirio, the global cloud consultancy that acquired the 630,000 member [topcoder] developer/design/data science community platform, today announced a partnership intended to bring high-quality apps more quickly to market. With this partnership, Applause testing services – and its global community of more than 140,000 professional software and app testers around the world – will become accessible to the [topcoder] community.
 
Through their agreement, the two companies will help enterprises realize the end-to-end benefits of crowdsourcing as these customer organizations design, develop, test and launch winning digital experiences for their users.
• [topcoder] will refer  its customer companies to Applause testing services, enabling a unified, crowd-based experience across the software development lifecycle,  including functional, usability, load and localization testing.
• Applause will recommend [topcoder] to interested companies from its base of more than 2,000 customers.
• Together, Applause and [topcoder] will work to further streamline a unified and complete crowdsourced software development lifecycle.
 
“In today’s apps economy it’s more important than ever that web & mobile applications work in-the-wild, where users work and play,” said Applause CEO, Doron Reuveni. “By empowering the [topcoder] community with our global testing capabilities, companies can be sure the user perspective is taken into account through application design, development and testing.  And this valuable insight will enable those companies to launch apps that delight their users.”  
 
Lee Odess, General Manager and Vice President of Marketing at Brivo Labs, an Appirio customer, added, “We’ve had great success working with Appirio to accelerate development of innovative applications via crowdsourcing.  The Applause partnership makes this an even more comprehensive solution, by adding the testing functionality that is so critical to our business and to the quality of applications generally. The alignment of these two organizations is a value-driver for any business concerned with both speed and quality.”
 
“We’re thrilled to be working with Applause,” said Appirio CEO, Chris Barbin. “Appirio customers will now have access not only to incredibly skilled developers via [topcoder], but to professional testers  who will enable them to launch their applications more quickly and cost-effectively.  This is a fantastic alignment that will advance the enterprise business case for crowdsourcing.”

The move comes months after Appirio acquired [topcoder], giving Appirio and its customers access to 630,000 of the world’s best developers, designers and data analytics experts.
 
Founded in 2007 as uTest, Applause launched under its new name and expanded its app quality vision last  month. That same day, the company announced its formal entry into the EU market by acquiring German crowdtesting leader, Testhub (which will become Applause EU in the coming weeks). In January, the company (then still known as uTest) closed a $43MM Series E Round of funding, led by Goldman Sachs.