HP was the first US company to create a joint venture subsidiary in China; three decades later, the vendor has become a major player in the country’s consumer and enterprise markets. Among enterprises, HP has strong brand awareness for its server products and services, traditional software solutions, and IT services, but rather less for holistic application life-cycle management (ALM), especially on the mobile side. I think it’s time for technology decision-makers and enterprise architects to seriously consider adopting mobile app delivery management solutions and to evaluate HP for that purpose. Here’s why:

  • HP’s portfolio now covers the entire mobile app life cycle.The products HP will bring to market as part of its latest strategy will eventually cover the entire mobile application life cycle from app design, development, and optimization to distribution and monitoring. For example, at the design stage, HP Anywhere — based on popular open source product Eclipse — allows developers to write once to multiple devices within its integrated development environment. And its service virtualization feature can help virtualize third-party cloud services and make them consumable across each layer of the system architecture, including web servers, application servers, and web services.
  • HP’s solution has rich optimization features suitable for Chinese enterprises. At the mobile app optimization stage, HP’s Mobile Center uses a comprehensive approach to functionality, interoperability, usability, performance, and security to consolidate and automate mobile testing. Mobile Center is integrated with LoadRunner, one of the most popular performance engineering tools in Chinese market.

For example, HP Mobile Center can validate end-to-end functionality and all UI components attributed to its service, network, and data virtualization capabilities and can validate composite test cases via smoke testing or regression testing. From an interoperability perspective, the product can simulate exceptional conditions such as voice or SMS interruptions and resource conflicts with camera or GPS apps. It also supports peripheral testing of components including near field communication, Bluetooth, and iBeacon.

  • HP’s network virtualization feature has unique value for Chinese companies. Mobile connectivity varies greatly in different geographies in China, and even between districts within tier one cities: Strong 4G connectivity on one avenue might dramatically change to 2G or even no signal when the user roams to another street. It’s very important to ensure that mobile app functions and features provide a consistent user experience under varying connectivity scenarios. Network virtualization can easily identify and record real-world network performance and emulate it to test app performance, analyze test results, and implement performance optimization strategies.

Certainly, HP can still improve its mobile ALM solutions; for example, it can augment its go-to-market messaging for business stakeholders, work better with packaged applications, and ensure consistent management across traditional and mobile applications. Technology decision-makers now have another option beyond existing offerings such as IBM Worklight and SAP Sybase Unwired Platform. Which one do you think will best suit your application scenarios?