For our first year in business, I am amazed and honored by the projects we’ve had the opportunity to work on. We’ve got several things cooking here – but the latest project to go live is that of Sauce Labs.

This is a company that is founded by the original author of Selenium, the open source web test automation software. Since I’ve spent so much of my career doing web applications development and go-to market, I’ve seen Selenium in action and know that the ability to simultaneously test across browsers is critical—especially when something new like a new release of Firefox or Internet Explorer or even a new operating system like Snow Leopard comes out. Problem is, Selenium while hugely popular, has never had any proper commercial backing and maintenance. So updates to ensure it test correctly across the same updates it is supposed to cover can be problematic. So when we had the opportunity to work with the Sauce guys to help take them to market to fix this problem, we jumped at it.

http://saucelabs.com

Today, we’re launching a new download, Sauce RC which is basically Selenium IDE & RC wrapped into a nice installer with a host of bugfixes to ensure it works across the latest browsers (even last week’s Firefox update!). But where the Sauce products really gets interesting is their Sauce OnDemand hosted test automation cloud. Here, you can use your Selenium or Sauce-based test scripts, upload them to the cloud and run against 10 popular browsers. Being a cloud-based service, you pay by test minutes that are incredibly affordable. Instant access to test infrastructure that you don’t have to maintain. What web application software development company wouldn’t want to have access to that?

There’s a lot more to come to continue building the Sauce portfolio of user services out, but for now I’d like to congratulate the Sauciers that invited us to be a part of this project – John Dunham, Jason Huggins, Steve Hazel and of course the always helpful rock of our development Santi Suarez Ordoñez. And of course – to the Silicon Spark team – Joanna “I will be one with Github” Duff, and Shannon “Python doesn’t scare me” Dunn. Great job everyone!