Data paves the way for every strategic move made by banks and insurance companies. Whether looking to create a new service, complying with regulations, or overhauling and re-engineering legacy operations, a massive data project is always central to the effort. For financial services businesses, the pace at which they can reshape and repurpose data has become a key determinant of their ability to predict market trends and meet client expectations.

Almost all software and web-based companies (SaaS, e-commerce, and more) that care about a bug-free user experience will eventually need a systematic and repeatable process to test their products. And for most software teams, the only way to feasibly accomplish testing fast enough that it doesn’t become a bottleneck in the software development lifecycle is to incorporate automation tools.

Today is a great day at Sauce Labs! We just announced that we’ve acquired Backtrace, a provider of best-in-class error monitoring solutions for software developers and engineers. Backtrace enables organizations to mitigate application risk and improve digital quality by empowering development teams to rapidly deploy code with confidence knowing that they can quickly identify and remediate bugs once in production.

As far as web test automation goes, Selenium is certainly the most popular toolset. That popularity is uncontested. A survey on test automation finding that 54% of the respondents were using Selenium might be surprising only in that the number is so low. Many of the alternatives to Selenium, Software-as-a-Service products that record and re-run entirely in the browser, still use the Selenium as the core driving technology.