Raleigh-based supply chain consulting company Tryon Solutions announced today the official launch of its spin-out software company, Cycle Labs. This change will allow Tryon Solutions to focus on consulting and Cycle Labs to put all its efforts into further developing the company’s industry-leading testing automation platform, Cycle, which is used by Fortune 500 companies around the globe.
Josh Owen, who will serve as CEO of Cycle Labs, and Adam Downing, CEO of Tryon Solutions, co-founded Tryon Solutions in 2009 to help companies leverage their services and solutions to increase productivity, manage risk and optimize operations across their supply chain. In 2014, Tryon Solutions created the Cycle software to supplement their professional services. Cycle is a continuous testing platform designed to support business-process automation.
The formation of Cycle Labs will occur over the next several weeks, with the official launch of the company on July 1. Owen said about 30 employees from Tryon Solutions will join Cycle Labs. (You can find more info on the startup’s press release.)
The creation of Cycle Labs represents a broader maturity and shift in the company’s vision that began in recent years as, Owen said, they saw a potential for Cycle to meet needs beyond simply the antiquated one of defensively protecting against bugs, which is what most traditional testing automation focuses on almost exclusively.
Cycle Labs aims to modernize enterprise software deployment and help companies innovate faster through continuous test automation, Owen said.
“Companies can have bug-free software with no particular issues in the code,” Owen said, “but it may not actually solve their business need or work with other systems they have in their ecosystem. That level of business-process testing just isn’t being addressed.”
The Cycle platform is flexible enough to integrate across a company’s other enterprise solutions, so that any changes to the system—like a Salesforce update or any system overhaul—are done quickly, ensuring that critical business processes aren’t interrupted, Owen said. Especially in the supply chain space, he said, a common reason the entire system falls apart is because collaboration and communication amongst the various teams that deploy different software is fragmented.
To combat this from the get-go, Cycle uses a collaborative method to build its solutions. The method calls for gathering all of a business’ stakeholders in a meeting to write and agree upon the test requirements—quite literally getting everyone on the same page—then configuring a solution that meets those test requirements, rather than the other way around. Constructing a solution upfront helps make subsequent system-wide changes more like iterative updates rather than exhaustive, time-consuming overhauls, Owen said.
The launch of Cycle Labs as a standalone software startup gives the team the opportunity to rebrand themselves as an option for businesses outside of the supply chain realm. Firms outside of that space have shown hesitancy in the past in adopting Cycle due to its association with Tryon Solutions and its supply-chain-focused consulting services, Owen said.
After all, the goal of the Cycle Labs is to give customers the freedom to act faster and be more flexible, which benefits businesses across the board.
“Ultimately, our vision is to inspire individuals and organizations to strive for continuous, iterative improvement,” Owen said. “At the end of the day, test automation is simply a mechanism to allow companies to innovate faster. So having a cohesive testing strategy that spans across multiple teams and other technologies is a necessity in order to be competitive in today’s world.”