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Shunra: with HP partnership and high budget clientele, Center City-based app performance testing company “here to stay”

Ever wonder how companies know their mobile applications — like, say, the application that lets you access your bank account online — are actually effective? For some companies, it’s probably a little bit of trial and error, but for a surprising number of big names — the list of Fortune 100 companies they boast on […]

Shunra. (PRNewsFoto/Shunra)

Ever wonder how companies know their mobile applications — like, say, the application that lets you access your bank account online — are actually effective?

For some companies, it’s probably a little bit of trial and error, but for a surprising number of big names — the list of Fortune 100 companies they boast on their website could finance another small planet — the answer is Shunra, a service that analyzes mobile applications and offers companies performance testing to help them identify application issues.

“Companies needed a way to confirm application performance before deployment (or in troubleshooting) because even though applications behaved well in test, they did not behave well when rolled out to real users on the real network,” said Chris Hughes, the company’s CFO. “Shunra provided a way to emulate the real world so that testing would be more accurate.”

Last week, though, Shunra, took its service capacity to the next level by partnering with Hewlett Packard to enhance it’s mobile network monitoring. The two companies will be taking their integrated service to demonstrate it in front of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, as eWeek.com reported.

“Our mobile story is growing because it’s a no-brainer solution for every single industry,” said Hughes.

Over the past two years, Shunra has had to evolve in order to address the network challenges that occur when companies try to implement applications across mobile, cloud and web-based infrastructures.

“Companies are having the same issues with ensuring performance across these networks. The challenge remains the same, but the networks have changed,” Hughes said. “Shunra has evolved to address the changing nature of networks and audiences, again enabling a better and more accurate way of emulating and thus predicting application behavior in the real world.”

Shunra has created a comprehensive solution that does more than emulate real world conditions, says Hughes. He says Shunra can discover real-world network conditions and virtualize those conditions in a test lab, analyze potential issues by location or user group, automate remediation or optimization suggestions customized to the site or application being tested, analyze performance, make necessary changes to application and test the impact of these changes.

The end result, Hughes says, is that organizations can be confident their applications will meet user expectations.

Despite its elite clientele, you may not have heard of Shunra, which is headquartered in Center City. Still, Hughes says 11-year-old Shunra considers itself to be a member of the Philly tech old guard.

“We are an older Philly tech company that was ahead of its time,” Hughes said.

But Shunra, which also has offices in London and Israel and boasts nearly 100 employees, hasn’t always been based in Philly. Founded in 1999, Shunra started out with offices in New York  and Israel. The company relocated its New York office to Philadelphia in 2006 after receiving its first and only round of venture capital in 2004 —  a total of $11.5 million from Insight Venture Partners and Carmel Ventures, Hughes told Technically Philly.

Going forward Hughes says the company has big plans to build off of its partnership with HP.

“We will continue to make investments in sales, marketing and performance engineers. Increasing headcount over 10 percent this year,” Hughes said. “Our partner community has grown and will continue to grow. We also expect tremendous growth in the mobile market for our solutions.”

But when it comes to Philadelphia, Hughes says Shunra is here to stay.

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