Sauce Labs, the agentic software quality assurance leader created by the founders of Selenium and Appium, today announced that branded communications innovator First Orion has leveraged Sauce Labs to transform its physical device testing processes. First Orion replaced its manual, device-heavy testing infrastructure with Sauce Labs’ programmable Real Device Cloud, accelerating telecom and mobile release cycles by up to 40% while freeing up 35% of engineering and QA capacity.

“Sauce Labs has become more than a testing provider for First Orion. They’re a strategic partner and an increasingly important part of how we think about our product strategy,” said Mark Himelfarb, Chief Technology Officer, First Orion. “The Real Device Cloud gives us the flexibility to build the custom workflows demanded by a unique telecommunications environment, creating a foundation that will help us innovate going forward.”

First Orion employed Real Device Cloud to move beyond a fragmented, manually managed fleet of test devices to a fully programmable, real-device testing layer. Sauce Labs provided First Orion with complete market-matrix device breadth—combining broad OS and OEM coverage with the deep API control needed for complex telecom validation. As a result, the company was able to achieve:

  • 20% baseline improvement in release-cycle time across products, rising to as much as 40% for telecom solutions and mobile apps.

  • 35% of combined engineering and QA capacity reclaimed, giving those teams more time for product development, architecture, test design and quality analysis.

  • More than 10% savings on physical-device spending alone.

“As software delivery accelerates to AI speed, traditional testing approaches and infrastructure become a massive bottleneck, especially in complex environments such as telecom,” said Prince Kohli, CEO of Sauce Labs. “First Orion’s results prove that an AI-native code release assurance foundation is key to scaling modern mobile app releases.”

Sauce Labs helps First Orion to smoothly scale testing as business grows

First Orion provides scam protection and branded communications technology for wireless carriers, businesses, and their customers. Before using Sauce Labs, managing physical device fleets across distributed teams consumed up to 10% of engineering bandwidth in setup time alone while creating test environment inconsistencies.

First Orion leveraged Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud, accessing a global fleet of public and private real devices with genuine device diversity across Apple, Google, and other OEM hardware—to expand device coverage and build custom tooling. The team achieved screen mirroring, streaming logs, and maintaining persistent connections for long-running communications tests without hardware maintenance. This API-level control enabled the company to support specialized telecom workflows impossible on conventional testing portals, turning Sauce Labs into underlying infrastructure for product development rather than just a testing service.

“We looked at other vendors but found their programmatic capabilities too limited, particularly with moving data in and out, managing traffic, and emulating different conditions,” said Himelfarb. “Sauce Labs stood out because it could give First Orion access to real devices with live SIM cards on U.S. carriers while also providing the level of control the company needed through its API.”

Programmability provides foundation to ramp up AI adoption

Real Device Cloud is also giving First Orion a foundation for bringing AI more directly into how it builds releases. By making real-device telemetry, logs, network signals and test results more accessible, First Orion can feed AI models the rich, real-world context they need to identify patterns, diagnose failures, surface insights and automate decisions that would otherwise require manual engineering review.

This will allow AI-driven development tools to interact more directly with the testing environment, using device data to inform changes, validate new functionality across devices and operating systems, and provide developers with faster feedback as they build.

Go here to learn about how Sauce Labs is empowering First Orion to accelerate release cycles, reclaim QA capacity, and save on device spend.

About Sauce Labs

Sauce Labs is the agentic software quality assurance leader created by the founders of Selenium and Appium. Its AI-Unified Release Assurance platform, AURA, closes the loop from business intent to production confidence by authoring, executing, analyzing, and self-healing tests at AI speed, with humans in control. Informed by more than 8.7 billion test executions, Sauce Labs supports 300,000+ enterprise users, including eight of the world’s 10 largest financial institutions. Learn more at saucelabs.com.

About First Orion

First Orion is a global leader in Transparency in Communications®, helping businesses, carriers, and consumers make every connection more transparent, trusted, and secure. As the pioneer of branded calling, First Orion delivers branded communication solutions that improve engagement, strengthen brand trust, and help combat fraud, spoofing, and unwanted communications. Headquartered in North Little Rock, Arkansas, First Orion serves leading enterprises and mobile operators worldwide.

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