US operator AT&T has teamed up with IT giant IBM to help businesses develop more network efficient smartphone apps. By integrating the two firms’ technologies, they hope to enable enterprises to conduct testing and analysis of their apps’ network and battery usage.

The technology will also help enterprises make necessary changes to apps quickly to create better performing mobile apps, the firms added.

AT&T will integrate its Application Resource Optimiser (ARO) with IBM’s software development solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM).  AT&T’s ARO is a free, operator-agnostic, open source diagnostic tool that enables developers to analyse the performance of their apps. IBM’s CLM solution enables development teams to create software through collaboration across teams, and IBM claims the solution breaks down silos which cause delays in development work.

“ARO tackles a fundamental coding challenge developers face today – finding and fixing performance and power bottlenecks that detract from a great user experience,” said Carlton Hill, vice president –Developer Services, AT&T. “ARO can help developers create apps that conserve battery life, load pages faster and consume network resources in a smarter way, all of which improve the customer experience.”

Kristof Kloeckner, general manager for IBM rational software added: “Businesses are challenged with the need to provide rich mobile applications, while avoiding device power and network usage pitfalls that frustrate and turn away customers. With today’s news, we are advancing our DevOps strategy in support of better mobile application delivery.”