SmartBear Software is an American

privately-held A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is ...

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system (I ...

company that delivers tools for application performance monitoring (APM),

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invol ...

software testing Software testing is the act of examining the artifacts and the behavior of the software under test by validation and verification. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to apprecia ...

API testing API testing is a type of software testing that involves testing application programming interfaces (APIs) directly and as part of integration testing to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security. ...

and

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

management. The company is based in

Assembly Square Assembly Square is a neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts. It is located along the west bank of the Mystic River, bordered by Ten Hills and Massachusetts Route 28 to the north and the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston to the south. The dis ...

Somerville Somerville may refer to: *Somerville College, Oxford, a constituent college of the University of Oxford Places *Somerville, Victoria, Australia * Somerville, Western Australia, a suburb of Kalgoorlie, Australia * Somerville, New Zealand, a subur ...

in the

Greater Boston Area Greater Boston is the metropolitan region of New England encompassing the municipality of Boston (the capital of the U.S. state of Massachusetts and the most populous city in New England) and its surrounding areas. The region forms the northern ar ...

. The company was founded in 2009, out of a combination of companies, including one with a similar name.

History and founding

The original Smart Bear company was founded by Jason Cohen in 2003.

Insight Venture Partners Insight Partners (previously Insight Venture Partners) is an American venture capital and private equity firm based in New York City. The firm invests in growth-stage technology, software and Internet businesses. History Insight Partners was fo ...

acquired three companies, Smart Bear, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software, between 2007 and early 2009. These companies operated as AQA Holdings until being rebranded as SmartBear Software in 2010. After the rebranding, the company acquired Eviware in 2011, leading to API promoter and

SoapUI SoapUI is an open-source web service testing application for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and representational state transfers (REST). Its functionality covers web service inspection, invoking, development, simulation and mocking, fun ...

's founder, Ole Lensmar, joining the company. He later served as chief technology officer (CTO) of SmartBear. That same year, the company acquired APM vendor AlertSite. In 2013 SmartBear acquired Spanish APM vendor Lucierna. SmartBear then acquired the Open Source Community

Swagger A swagger or swagga is a swaggering gait. Swagger also may refer to: * Swagger or swagman, a transient labourer in Australia and New Zealand * Swagger (software), a specification for defining the interface of a REST web service now known as Open ...

in 2015 and its founder, Tony Tam, joined the company as head of products for Swagger and the commercial version of Swagger, SwaggerHub. In 2016, SmartBear acquired CrossBrowserTesting.com (CBT) and Ken Hamric, founder of CBT, joined the company as general manager of CrossBrowserTesting.com. In 2017,

Francisco Partners Francisco Partners is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. Founded in August 1999 and based in San Francisco with offices in London and New York City, Francis ...

acquired a majority stake in SmartBear Software.

AutomatedQA

AutomatedQA Corporation specialized in automated

tools and developer tools. It was founded in 1999 in

Las Vegas Las Vegas (; Spanish for "The Meadows"), often known simply as Vegas, is the 25th-most populous city in the United States, the most populous city in the state of Nevada, and the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the Las Vegas ...

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. N ...

. The company's first product was

AQtime AQtime is a performance profiler and memory/resource debugging toolset developed by SmartBear Software. It is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio Test Projects and Embarcadero RAD Studio that allows analyzing the application wi ...

, a binary instrumentation profiler to help optimize performance for

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

developed with

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

and

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computer technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was the development and sale of software development and software deployment product ...

compilers. It was released on November 12, 1999. The first version of TestComplete, AutomatedQA's automated software testing tool, was released in December 2000. In 2004, AutomatedQA released Automated Build Studio, an automated build management and continuous integration application. AQtrace, a new product by AutomatedQA, was released in June, 2008. AutomatedQA had received an SD Times 100 award three times, including the most recent SD Times 100 list for 2008. The SD Times 100 award honors the top 100 leaders and innovators in the

industry as judged by ''SD Times'' magazine. AutomatedQA remained an independent subsidiary of SmartBear from 2007 to 2010 until being merged into SmartBear Software.

Company

SmartBear is based in the

and has U.S. offices in

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to th ...

, and

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

. SmartBear also has offices and development centers in Ireland, India, Finland, Poland, Melbourne, and Sweden. Frank Roe became chief executive in March, 2020. SmartBear Software offers products in the following categories:

lifecycle,

automated testing In software testing, test automation is the use of software separate from the software being tested to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Test automation can automate some repetitive bu ...

behaviour-driven development In software engineering, behavior-driven development (BDD) is an agile software development process that encourages collaboration among developers, quality assurance experts, and customer representatives in a software project. It encourages team ...

(BDD),

test management Test management most commonly refers to the activity of managing a testing process. A test management tool is software used to manage tests (automated or manual) that have been previously specified by a test procedure. It is often associated with ...

, performance testing, mobile testing, monitoring,

code review Code review (sometimes referred to as peer review) is a software quality assurance activity in which one or several people check a program mainly by viewing and reading parts of its source code, and they do so after implementation or as an interru ...

, and three

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

tools. The company had mentions in the trade press. * Named the 2020SD Times 100: 'Best in Show' in Software Development for "APIs and Integration 2020" * Named one of the 100 Best Places to Work in Boston 2020 by BuiltIn * Named BostInno 2019 ‘50 on Fire’ Company * Zephyr was named by SoftwareWorld as one of the Top 10 Automated Software Testing Tools in 2019 * Awarded the 2019 SDTimes 100 Best in Show in Software Development * Won a TrustRadius 2019 Top Rated Award for SoapUI Pro in the Functional Testing category * TestComplete won the Devies Award for Best in App Analytics/Testing * AlertSite Received the FinTech Award from Finance Monthly * Named in Top Places To Work 2013 by

The Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...

* Employee's Choice Awards – Best Medium-Sized Company to Work 2014 by

Glassdoor Glassdoor is an American website where current and former employees anonymously review companies. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, it has additional offices in Chicago, Dublin, London, and São Paulo. Glassdoor also allows its users to ...

* Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide recognizes AlertSite as No. 2 on the list

References

External links

* {{Official website, www.smartbear.com Cloud applications Cloud computing providers Software companies based in Massachusetts Software performance management Technology companies based in the Boston area Software companies established in 2009 Companies based in Middlesex County, Massachusetts Somerville, Massachusetts 2009 establishments in Massachusetts Software companies of the United States