Smartesting announces certification as "HP Software Gold Business Partner"

Smartesting, designer and developer of software solutions for automating the certification and testing of computer applications, is set to become the world's 7th independent software developer to obtain HP Software Gold certification for the HP Quality Center offer. The certification will be awarded during the HP Software Universe conference, held on December 9-11 in Vienna. In addition to integrating Smartesting solutions technically within HP's Quality Center offer, this partnership also creates opportunities for new commercial cooperation between the two companies, whose offers complement each other in the software testing market, a market that the Gartner Group expects to reach over 13 billion dollars by 2010.
"Our partnership with HP in France, in Europe and since this summer, in India, represents a strategic direction for Smartesting, who is primarily seeking to unite an ecosystem of technology partners. We would like to offer fresh opportunities to these new partners in order to encourage large companies to further automate their software testing. As the worldwide leader in terms of market share, HP Software brings together a broad community comprised of both experts and users in all the sectors we wish to help," says Laurent Py, CEO of Smartesting.
"Smartesting corresponds perfectly to our profile for Gold partners: a company with innovative technology integrated with the HP offer, which optimizes our customers' approach to quality assurance by establishing coherent, reproducible, and standardized processes," adds Bruno Buffenoir, Director of HP Software France.
Cutting-edge technological integration
Smartesting's certification was awarded after a detailed examination of its solution by HP's laboratory in Fort Collins (USA) last September, focusing on the Smartesting Center™ offer, based on Test Designer™, a tool that enables tests to be generated automatically from test models and published to HP Quality Center.
"We are pleased that the technical integration of our solutions with HP Quality Center, used by our clients for over 18 months, has now received official recognition with Gold certification. Now all HP solution users can also use our Test Designer™ tool as a complement to Quality Center. This will even further boost their productivity increases and improve the quality of their test production," adds Emmanuel Vergé, Product Marketing Director at Smartesting.
"The Smartesting solution enables us to bring our clients an innovative complementary offer that is totally integrated with our Quality Center offer, in order to maximize the efficiency of software test strategies," says Olivier Sanchez, Manager of the HP Quality Center France offer.
Developing commercial synergy
HP and Smartesting confirmed the interest in Smartesting's certification by IT departments in large companies during a dinner conference held on September 30 with Atos Origin on the subject of test automation. This event brought together over 20 information service directors from major French and European companies.

This partnership is also an opportunity for both Smartesting and HP to launch new projects together, such as the development of new Test Designer features specifically adapted to HP's BPT (Business Process Testing) module being driven by Smartesting's R&D teams.
About Smartesting - www.smartesting.com
Founded in 2003 as a spin-off of the CNRS/INRIA Computer Science Laboratory at the University of Franche-Comté, France, Smartesting (formerly LEIRIOS) has become a worldwide reference in the market for software testing with its innovative automatic test generation tools. Over 100 man-years have gone into developing the Smartesting solution.

Considered by many to be a prime example of research-based French innovation, Smartesting is an independent software developer. Today, the company's innovative technology for optimizing Test Centers and Test Factories has positioned it alongside major international players.
Smartesting's patented solution helps reduce risks related to the quality of mission-critical applications, while optimizing the production of functional tests. This solution improves predictability and productivity within specialized test centers and covers a wide range of business requirements. The Smartesting solution is used to validate information systems for large companies in numerous sectors, such as banking, finance, transportation and telecommunications. Clients include BNP Paribas and SNCF.
Smartesting has a staff of 30 people, with offices in Paris, Amsterdam and Besançon (France) and Bangalore (India). The company's headquarters and R&D center are in Besançon. With support from OSEO, Smartesting has carried out three rounds of capital investment, in 2004 for 1 million euros, 2005 for 2 million euros and 2008 for 4.8 million euros.