SPM is mobile software's secret weapon

THEY ARE generally regarded as duller than dishwasher, but software production management (SPM) tools are the latest must-haves in the mobile phone world. Talk about reducing time to market for mobile software.

With the growing complexity of today's smartphones, six out of the top ten mobile phone vendors currently use Electric Cloud's SPM software, the company claims.

The INQ was convinced that Electric Cloud's Wayne Collier was just itching to reveal a seventh phone vendor customer but had to hold back. He wouldn't say who the vendor was but it certainly ain't Apple.

The company's client list also reads like a who's who of the big mobile chip vendors as well, including Texas Instruments, Freescale and Qualcomm.

Most of the software integration problems Electric Cloud's customers experience stem from the fact that new handsets are gaining extra capabilities faster than software engineers can poke a stick at them.

Electric Cloud swears its Electric Accelerator product can reduce software build times dramatically. For example, Accelerator has helped Symbian UI company UIQ reduce build times by a factor of 11. Shame that UIQ is on the brink of disappearing, though.

Anyway, faster builds mean that software engineers don't sit around idly twiddling their thumbs when they could be writing new code. Collier claims that it can reduce build wait times down to 15 minutes from as much as three hours.

He also argues that if problems are identified at the earliest opportunity using SPM, they can be fixed with 1/80th of the cost of bug-fixing a shipped product.

There was also a hint from Collier that a specialist mobile games company has discovered that Electric Cloud's products can give it a competitive advantage in bringing different flavours of the same phone game to market as fast as possible.

Again he wouldn't name names but it ain't Player X. µ