We’ve been watching the mobile space for about a year and as recently as last summer, mobile application development for our enterprise customers was more of an horizon event than a current project. But now, we’ve clearly reached a tipping point–what a difference 6 months makes.

With smartphones and tablets crashing into enterprise IT, everything from mobile device management to mobile security to mobile application development is a number one priority. Predictably, the requirements are many and the answers are few—especially given the n-dimensional problem of hardware, operating systems, languages and networks.

This all preamble to the news that we’ve just announced two products focused squarely on mobile application development and deployment for HTML5 and JavaScript–across all device and all operating systems. Our application record and replay technology—so potent for C, C++ and Java—bridges some deep gaps in mobile application development vis a vis standard enterprise web applications. Everything from debugging to testing to security to real user monitoring and customer support reminds us of the state-of-the-art circa 1999.

In addition, there is a marvelous ecosystem of HTML5- and JavaScript-focused Mobile Application Development Platforms such as Titanium, Sybase Unwired Platform, Adobe AIR and PhoneGap—a natural home for our mobile products and where we fit seamlessly and productively. Plus Microsoft is coming with Metro.

So, we are excited about the mobile space and ReplayMOBILE and apmMOBILE are the first of a family of mobile products that will ship this year. Because of where we sit in the code execution on smartphones and tablets, we see everything from what part of the code is exercised to what works (and doesn’t) through what data flows through to “did that last dot release of the O/S just break our app?”

We’ve heard “wild west” often applied to mobile application development. Here comes the cavalry.

Check out our HTML5 and JavaScript products at

http://www.replaysolutions.com/products/replaymobile.

We will be making some exciting product announcements next week that addresses a similar kind of tension—this one in the software defect resolution space. Typically if a tester, developer or support person wants to get started on diagnosing an application bug, they’ll do some screen scrapes and a log dump but what really accelerates defect resolution are source-level root cause diagnostics. With current profilers, monitors and probe products, the tradeoff between “there’s bug in your code and here’s some logs” and “you have a fatal exception and here is the offending thread and corresponding source code” has, up until now, been very difficult to reconcile.

That’s right, up until now. Given the experience we have working deep in Java code execution and the 100% visibility into program execution that our app recording technology provides, we have come up with some very clever ways to deliver both triage speed and root cause depth in the same debug UI. The quality equivalent of great tasting light beer.

Stay tuned for some truly electrifying advancements in software defect resolution. (Hint: Sept 27).

When it comes to producing quality software, it’s hard to argue against setting (and freezing) requirements, communicating them perfectly to all constituencies and then following a well-defined and monitored development process. That’s what we all aspire to. The problem is, just like with airplanes, automobiles and pharmaceuticals, the real world of complexity, human foibles and change always intrudes. That’s why testing exists—to catch defects before they get baked into the final product.

Software testing is the safety net underneath what is hopefully sound process and practice and while no one likes bug fixing, if defects are found early enough in the cycle, properly documented and communicated with enough information to find and fix them quickly, then quality will improve. It’s not the “free” quality that Phil Crosby espoused, but with the tools and techniques that are now available to QA and Dev teams, it’s less expensive that it used to be.

In the world of software, news that CA bought iTKO and Compuware acquired Dynatrace reminds us that as changes continue to grind away in the software development lifecycle, earthquakes like these two acquisitions will inevitably occur. The traditional silos of development, test and deployment/operations have been colliding for years as agile, DevOps and Cloud play to the overall need to reduce the time and effort to produce new business solutions.

The fact that two predominantly APM vendors have dived headfirst into ALM starkly illustrates the need to provide seamlessly integrated tools and management across a rapidly changing software development process. Leverage and value are now moving from “after the fact” monitoring and issue triage to pre-deployment detection and resolution.

ALM products are now at a premium because they can be effective at any point of the software development lifecycle.

36 percent of the survey’s respondents said they would either test or deploy parts of cloud infrastructure in 2010. 35 percent of respondents said they expect a twofold or higher increase in virtual machine deployments in 2010.

While the survey validated our approach with JBoss, Tomcat, WebLogic and WebSphere developers, we were actually surprised at the unexpectedly high percentage of enterprise Java developers who are proactively testing or deploying cloud infrastructure in 2010.

The full results of the survey are available for download on our website.

It feels like SaaS has been a story waiting to happen since around 1999. The network is the computer, thin clients with fat pipes, scaling servers, clustering, virtualization… Seems like all the pieces are in place, the cloud is up there. But still there are only a handful of winners that have really figured out the SaaS model, and a sea of also rans that got run over along the way.

Why?

Well, some of them were just plain bad ideas. Irrational exuberance and all that. But I think there is another big factor at play here. When you have these giant, sea change moments in the way that software is designed, built, shipped and supported, not to mention sold, you’d better have the tools and technology to support you along the way, otherwise it’s not going to be easy! In fact, it’s going to be hard. Really hard.

I could point you to a room full of ex-CEO’s who will attest to this fact. Whipping up your latest Web 2.0 mashup and putting it online is usually about 3% of the challenge. What happens when people actually start using it? Here’s where the rubber meets the road.

One of the essential elements of success is getting a solid, scalable application online and running smoothly and securely. But there just hasn’t been a lot of innovation here.

Being able to quickly identify, respond to and resolve issues in a SaaS application is critical, because if one server has a bad day, it’s not one customer that feels pain, it’s hundreds or thousands. And that’s bad. SaaS acts like a big hairy amplifier on any defect or scalability issue that might be lurking in your app.

Technologies like Introscope, Patrol, Vantage, Snort and my software debugging company Replay are starting to address the needs, but our customers are still pioneering and forging the landscape as they increasingly feel the pains of this new software paradigm we find ourselves in.

So great job, VMware, Amazon and Linus for getting us to this point where we finally can explore the dream of The Cloud. Now it’s up to companies like us to make SaaS applications manageable, cost effective, and safe as we keep things running up there 24/7 with less ‘unscheduled maintenance’!