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Where have I been? Answer: Customers & Innovation

Last night a friend asked me how long it’s been since I last did a blog post?  I suggested a few weeks, but to my horror it has been over 120 days…Yikes!  “Hello, McFly…anyone home…start typing?”

Let me start by rewinding a bit, as we have some catching up to do.  We had another epic summer here at SOASTA.  Beyond the customer and employee growth we’ve been experiencing this past year, it has been incredibly rewarding for all of us at SOASTA to see how “Cloud Testing” has become such a “game changer” in the area of performance management.   Since we introduced this innovative approach (in 2006) for delivering web application performance, thousands of individuals and hundreds of companies are now cloud testing using a variety of new tools that have hit the market in the past year.   We here at SOASTA now boast of having over 200 customers.  Many of these are Global 2000 companies in media, entertainment, retail and finance.  All of which are now having their web sites “SOASTA Certified” for performance.   Our fantastic growth appears to be fueled by several factors.  First, it is being driven by the enormous success and growth in web applications that are deployed today, and perhaps more importantly by the subsequent fear of the impact should one of these business critical websites fail, once delivered.   Second, that many of these new applications are running “heavy”, with dynamic content that at times makes performance sluggish or, even worse, crashes under stress.   The speed, affordability,  and scale  of Cloud Testing has enabled thousands of applications to avoid the performance hurdles of poor design, coding mistakes, bad switch settings or unpredictable traffic spikes; while improving the overall end user experience of several leading consumer sites that we all use.  This makes our efforts over the past four years… very rewarding!  Who knew that Testing would be such a hot growth market in 2010?

Over the course of the summer (and continuing) I have had the opportunity to visit several countries, states and cities around the globe to talk to our customers, partners and prospects.  What I found was that 2010-11 may be one of the most exciting times in my 32 years of experience in technology.  There is an enormous “wave of change” going on out there, one not driven by technology or even, as is commonly purported, driven by cloud computing.  This “wave” is being driven by new business requirements for reaching a new type of consumer…the mobile consumer.    Companies big and small are re-tooling from traditional brick and mortar stores to dynamic digital store fronts (websites).  This shift is changing the way IT thinks…they are no longer supporting an end user community of employees, but now it’s a community made up of actual consumers.  That Changes Everything!  New business needs require new tools.  That’s where SOASTA comes in…fueling our growth in the US, Asia and EMEA markets over the past year.

But, we have not only been adding customers and employees, we have also greatly expanded our award winning technology into some interesting new areas, such as Production and Continuous Testing, and Private as well as Public Test Clouds.  New products are about to be released that (we believe) will extend our innovation leadership in the performance management arena.  On top of all that, the first of our many Technology Patents was recently approved, a crowning achievement for the best engineering team in performance management.  We believe this patent, as with the others in process, will have quite an impact in the cloud testing and application performance markets for years to come.  And were not done!

We’ve had a great few years here at SOASTA,  and the best is yet to come!

What Happens When Vendors Repackage Old Technology and Call it a Cloud Service?

In an effort to remain relevant, some software vendors take marketing advantage of the newest hot technology fad at the expense of their own customers. Cloud computing (the newest hot trend) has definitely been defined and positioned by some traditional software and hardware vendor’s marketing organizations to meet their specific agenda, which usually means extending the life of an existing product or product line.  It has become a virtual “cloud rush” as to how many times “cloud computing” can be mentioned in product and marketing collateral. . . including collateral for products that were first developed back when Bill Clinton was president!

A great example of this “cloud rush” is Hewlett Packard with its LoadRunner product.  LoadRunner was developed in the early 90’s to help corporate development teams test client/server applications.  It became, over time, the de-facto standard testing tool for most enterprise companies and was priced accordingly.  Entry-level pricing began at $100,000 and if you needed to simulate thousands of users the cost skyrocketed into the millions of dollars very quickly.

Today, HP is attempting to “perfume the pig” so to speak, by repackaging LoadRunner into a new cloud-based service called Elastic Test. To the uneducated observer it simply looks like a new cloud service for testing web applications.  The problem is that it’s the same LoadRunner product built almost 20 years ago to test client/server applications and it carries a lot of technology baggage along with it. Subsequently, HP chooses to pass along a lot of this baggage in the form of costs back to its customer base.  For example, an entry-level HP virtual test will take weeks to develop and will have a “starting” cost of $45,000.  Hardly living up to cloud computing’s value proposition for on-demand services that provide ease, speed and affordability.

Newer players are quickly swooping in to fill in the gap left by HP’s lack of R&D in the cloud space. New players such as SOASTA, whose CloudTest service was built exclusively to leverage cloud computing for testing. It offers a low-cost, highly scalable and easy-to-use on-demand test model for customers.  As a comparison, the $45,000 “entry-level” HP Virtual Test that takes weeks to perform and deliver results, can be done within 24 hours at a cost of $750 using SOASTA’s On-Demand CloudTest service. This lower cost model also delivers greater quality testing. Traditionally, you may have only performed 6-8 performance tests on a client/server application because of the cost and time required.  Now, with true cloud testing services like SOASTA CloudTest, you can perform hundreds of tests for significantly less cost and in the same amount of time it takes to perform 6-8 traditional tests. This impact is significant, delivering greater reliability in your web applications.

Customers choosing to stay with HP as their test vendor out of loyalty will continue to have to deal with a 20 year old technology trying to conform to a 2009 eco-system, as well as pay a premium of up to 45X for that loyalty.  This, in a world where websites need more and more performance testing as they become more complex and we reach higher and higher spikes in user traffic.

Cloud computing is a “game changer” for customers seeking greater levels of web reliability. It enables new, leading-edge, agile and cost-effective cloud testing services.  However, be careful of impostors claiming to offer cloud services . . . more often then not you will be able to recognize them by their price tags and by the lack of quality in the actionable intelligence they deliver.  SOASTA CloudTest is the cloud leader in delivering the highest quality performance intelligence available on the market today.

CLOUD: Performance Intelligence Delivers Certainty

Tom Wailgum wrote an interesting piece in CIO Magazine this past weekend about enterprises “still crazy for BI after all these years”.  He notes that  companies still see business intelligence as transformational, but he also notes, many execs are still relying on their gut to make critical business decisions.  Take web site deployment for example. Even though web usage has risen to amazing levels in recent years and sites have become every organizations’ primary sales and marketing channel, we still push out new sites every day without a clue as to how they will perform in LIVE production. Don’t get me wrong, we all test our applications functionality, but rarely do we load and performance test these sites. Testing is so damn expensive. The fact is, more often then not, we don’t have a clue IF our NEW sales organization (our web sites) will actually  show up to work today. Where is the business intelligence in web deployment?

The answer could be found in Cloud Testing. First, we definitely need a new, affordable, and scalable test model that moves web performance analysis away from a simple math exercise. In the past,  if we had done any load testing (cost) we simulated only a fraction of the expected traffic to a site  (5%-10%).   Then, we would calculate what the impact of the other 95% of load would have on the site and application. A very inexact science, that has led to some pretty big and damaging headlines in the Wall Street Journal as many sites have crashed under stress and load. In another words, we need an affordable and scalable test model that allows us to regularly test 100% or 200% of our potential or expected load. Next, we need business intelligence tools specifically built to analyze the data that these tests produce.  Performance testing and monitoring produce huge amounts of data that needs to be analyzed to the tiniest detail. Finding the sources of latency and stress in applications and networks can be incredibly difficult if you have the wrong tools that only provide a single dimensional view of your results such as log files or excel spreadsheets. There is simply too much test data to review. What you really need are sophisticated BI tools that provide  an aggregated and correlated multi-dimensional view of the data in order to pinpoint and understand potential trouble spots. Given that our web sites are our new sales and marketing channels, web site deployment is an amazing area of uncertainty for all of us. We need a new testing model that delivers performance-based business intelligence before our sites go LIVE. We need CloudTest.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

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