Sauce Labs ramped up its efforts in the mobile testing space by acquiring TestObject today, a real device mobile app testing platform.

After taking a look at industry trends, Sauce Labs discovered that there was a dramatic uptake in interest surrounding the adoption of automated mobile testing, said vice president of product at Sauce Labs, Lubos Parobek. In general, Sauce Labs found that many companies are looking into the mobile testing space with emulators and real devices, but haven’t started the journey, he said.

Mobile testing brings a few challenges to the table for organizations, especially with the difficulty in starting an automated testing process for all the applications, websites and web applications that work across operating systems and browsers. According to Parobek, it can be difficult to set up testing infrastructures with all of those combinations available, and with mobile, that challenge becomes even greater.

(Related: CollabNet works on DevOps solutions)

“The diversity of different devices, operating systems those devices are running on, and the different apps you might have on those devices are very wide,” said Parobek.

He added that emulators and simulators for mobile don’t always provide all the capabilities a physical device offers, and the combined solution of TestObject and Sauce Labs will give customers automated testing coverage across desktops, emulators, simulators, and now real devices for web, mobile, and hybrid or native apps.

Currently, Sauce Labs offers a cloud-based automated testing platform, and bringing in TestObject will allow Sauce Labs to add additional real device coverage and a private cloud solution for enterprises. This will be combined with Sauce Lab’s existing Real Device Cloud, which will turn Sauce Labs into a web and mobile testing platform.

Also, in order to update rapidly and move toward a faster release cycle, more customers are moving to DevOps, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration, as well as automated testing. According to Parobek, Sauce Labs, with the help of TestObject’s technology, will provide a platform that offers one place for customers to do all of their testing.

Parobek said TestObject will also help accelerate Sauce Lab’s European sales and marketing efforts, and expand its presence in the marketplace. Moving forward, it will continue to work from its headquarters in Berlin, and CEO Hannes Lenke will serve as the general manager for EMEA operations.