Turning Incredible Promise Into Credible Reality

New technology adoption is always a push-pull dance. Enterprises want the productivity and competitive advantage, but are understandably cautious until the risks are understood and performance proven. New technology vendors want to get out ahead of their competitors and gain preemptive market share quickly, sometimes before all the kinks are worked out. For both sides, it boils down to credibility.

Some SaaS vendors are proactively putting their performance stake in the ground and backing it up with guarantees. RightNow, a CRM application provider, starts giving money back to clients if up-time drops below 99.9 percent. Intacct, which offers financial management and accounting applications, offers a similar guarantee, and publishes their uptime stats right on their Web site.

“Web performance monitoring helps you to protect your bottom line, but also to build your brand and build customer loyalty,” says Neeraja Rasmussen, Keynote senior marketing manager for Web Performance, about SaaS vendors. “You can guarantee that you can deliver a certain level of service. Verified third-party data with high levels of trust is a definite competitive advantage for SaaS providers.”

Such data is the heart of effective, enforceable SLAs. And in a nascent SaaS marketplace, solid SLAs are imperative for credibility.


You may also would like to see:

1. Cloud Testing – SaaS 
2. Web monitoring services
3. Cloud monitoring solutions

The future: For everything an API

It’s becoming apparent already: Anything that consumes power is going to be connected in some way to the Internet. Cars, refrigerators, thermostats, TV, personal drones, you name it. There will be a way to connect with it, interact with it, and control it.

APIs are a powerful way to glean extra value from an enterprise’s data assets and digital resources, extending the reach of products and services, building the brand, and even generating revenue. It requires a thoughtful approach and commitment of resources to make it work.

“We call it the ‘Internetting space,’” says Kamenetska. “We’re really in a post-website era…Anything that you touch is going to become Internet-enabled, and the apps that are going to be there and the experience that you’re going to be having on those devices are really made possible by APIs.”



You may also would like to see:
1. ABCs of APIs
2. Performance monitoring: There’s an API for that
3. Testing on mobile devices
4. Web application monitoring

Performance monitoring: There’s an API for that

While IT departments are quickly racing into the private API game with their own data, they’re also being transformed by the ability to consume a greater number of vendor services by API. For example, data access via API can help ensure competitive performance for websites and apps by providing timely access to actionable data, and the ability to quickly filter the noise from the meaningful numbers. Keynote offers APIs that enable clients to grab their data in real time in order to create the visualizations that best serve their operational data needs — including combining with data from other sources — and to leverage software tools to quickly surface potential performance issues. -

With our API, Keynote frees client data from our systems,” says Aaron Rudger, product marketing manager at Keynote Systems. “Operations groups need to implement their own analysis, and integrate multiple tools to do their job. All their data is more valuable if it can be leveraged together. The Keynote API lets them pull in their performance data to use however they need it.

You may also would like to see:

1. Mobile developer tools
2. Mobile Testing Services
3. Web Application Monitoring

Birth of the Web API

APIs did not start with the Web. In fact, one of the most successful API stories ever is the Microsoft Windows API, which enabled all those third-party developers to create applications for Windows, and in turn propel it to near-monopoly status in desktop operating systems. Today, though, the talk is all about Web APIs and the interconnected ecosystems they support.

Among the earliest players to embrace Web APIs were the Internet giants-to-be such as Google, Amazon, and Salesforce. They started leveraging APIs in their early days, which helped them to become the dominant online forces they are today.

“They looked at these platforms they were creating and asked themselves, how do we generate interest?” says John Rakowski, a Forrester Research analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals. “How do we generate further partnerships with our customers and with partners out there who can help us innovate a lot quicker, who can utilize our platform to build our brand, but also to create a partner ecosystem?”
The answer was to pursue a proactive API strategy, reaching out to developers and supporting them as they created their own layers of interface and functionality on top of Google’s or Amazon’s or Salesforce’s data. The developers could be using the APIs to create applications for niche markets, or to integrate with other applications.

In addition to creating a partner ecosystem, Rakowski says that opening up a platform via APIs “also gets your brand out there and makes people aware of it very, very quickly, because they can interact with your platform, which means all-in-all, it leads to faster growth because there’s more awareness of your platform in the market.”

Source: Keynote Benchmark

You may also would like to see: 
1. ABCs of API
2. Mobile Testing Challenges for Web Applications
3. Testing Mobile Applications
4. Cloud application performance monitoring

The Four Types of Clouds Explained

In meteorology, you have cumulus, cirrus, stratus, and nimbus. In computing, you have private, public, hybrid, and community. Here's what each means:

Private cloud: The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on-premise or off-premise.

Public cloud: The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud services.

Hybrid cloud: The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).

Community cloud: The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizations or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.

You may also would like to see:
1. Performance monitoring for your cloud applications and services
2.  Private Cloud Monitoring

An Overview Of APIs And How They're Changing

Virtually anything you do online all day long — and virtually everything that makes the Internet in 2013 so convenient, helpful, portable, and smart — is made possible through the magic of APIs. Application Programming Interfaces enable all the devices on the Internet to access data and resources without the user having to actually visit the source.

It’s reasonable to say that APIs have totally made the online experience what it is today. They extend our Internet connection far beyond the browser to phones and tablets and every kind of connected device, to the point where one no longer thinks of being “online” — we’re just connected. And when you’re accessing the Internet the old-fashioned way, through a browser on a computer, APIs have transformed websites into data-driven, interactive, media-rich experiences.

Before long, everything we do, from driving our cars to managing our health and finances to entertaining ourselves to controlling every gadget, system and device in our lives, will be accomplished through the interaction of APIs.

You may also would like to see:

1. Mobile web readiness use cases

2. Characteristics of Web 2.0 Applications

3. Testing Mobile Applications

Web Performance Monitoring Just Got More Better

Recently, Keynote released an exciting new product Keynote Real User Perspective. This newest member in the Perspective family of monitoring services delivers actionable insight into the performance of Web and mobile sites based on the experience of real users.

Real User Perspective is special in 3 ways:

1. Lightweight SaaS
2. Start-to-end Real User Journeys
3. Integrated with Synthetic

Keynote now offers the most comprehensive offering for end user experience monitoring delivered as a service. It culminates a tremendous amount of development, infrastructure orchestration, and feedback from the scores of customers who participated in our product advisory and beta programs. Customers can now complement active, clean-room, synthetic monitoring with passive, real user monitoring that aligns to business outcomes—a marriage made in heaven! We think that’s more intelligent web performance monitoring.

You can request for a free trial now!