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 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

Mobile Cloud Testing Is ‘The New Norm’

With the deal of expensive and daunting task of setting up in-house mobile testing capabilities, more and more companies are turning to the cloud. Cloud service providers such as Keynote DeviceAnywhere provide immediate access to robust toolkits and, critically, a broad pool of real devices that can be tested live on carrier networks.

Currently, 28 percent of WQR respondents say they do their testing in the cloud; 39 percent report that they will be doing cloud testing by 2015. This rapid increase in adoption prompted the WQR authors to declare that “testing in the cloud is becoming the new norm.”-ibid. Device selection, speed, lower costs, and on-demand availability are some of the reasons companies are opting for cloud testing services instead of attempting to handle mobile testing in-house.

“It seems like just about everyone is interested in mobile testing services at this point,” Obstler says. “We see certain industries leading the way. Financial — look at how popular and powerful mobile check deposit has quickly become — and then healthcare, and insurance. Companies in these industries are focusing on both internal and external apps. It becomes very important, very quickly to have a process and platform in place to test these apps, or else it’s just overwhelming.”

Related Topics

1. Building a Mobile Automation Testing 2. Mobile Testing Challenges for Web Applications

Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience

Few months back, Keynote announced that the Keynote Global Network was being updated with Internet Explorer 9. As a result, our real browser monitoring service, Transaction Perspective™, is now measuring the performance of Web applications and sites using Microsoft’s latest Web browser. This makes Keynote the first on-demand monitoring service built on IE 9, which is pretty cool. But what’s even cooler is the ability that IE 9 gives us to measure a new class of performance metrics we call user experience metrics.
IE is still the big kid on the block when it comes to browser usage. With the demise of IE 6 in the United States, and the rise of Firefox and Chrome, it’s clear that users are quickly leaving “old” browsers for “modern” ones like IE 9. With high performance and broad support for open Web standards, browsers like IE 9 make it easier for companies to create a rich and snappy experience for consumers. In response, 34% of the top Internet sites now use HTML 5, and the use of JavaScript continues to rise. Transaction Perspective built on IE 9 allows customers to get a more precise view of their site performance, especially those leveraging new Web standards.
Our new Live Beta preview of MyKeynote 11 with Transaction Perspective lets you see performance in very important ways Learn More

Monitoring User Experience of the Cloud

In this blog, we are going to talk about metrics to build into service level agreements and learn how to track the quality of service users of SaaS and cloud applications actually experience.

Q&A With Vik Chaudhary, VP of Product Management and Corporate Development, Keynote Systems

Phil Waineright: I’m glad to have you with us because your — Keynote — is a SaaS provider itself, but you also actually work with SaaS and cloud companies who make use of your services, don’t you?

Vik Chaudhary: That’s right. In fact we do both. We started out as a cloud company and a SaaS company, well before those words were even invented, back 14 years ago. And today, we work with about 2800 different companies all over the world; SaaS companies are among them.

Phil Waineright: Right. So okay. So this part of the business is serving traditional enterprise businesses but part — a growing part I suppose of the business — is serving the cloud vendor community of one type or another.

Vik Chaudhary: As it turns out, the cloud vendor community is — especially in the SaaS world — is growing to include businesses that are using SaaS vendors very effectively. And because businesses typically care about their online performance and customer experience, they happen to look to us to help moderate the conversation between them and the SaaS providers so we can assure that performance and reliability of their applications are really top-notch.

Continue reading

"Performance" to cloud providers typically means only availability

One reason cloud performance monitoring is so critical is that cloud provider service is so nebulous. "Performance" to cloud providers typically means only availability; and even availability is only loosely guaranteed. For Amazon Web Services, as an example, unavailability means no connectivity at all during a five-minute period; if your user has a lousy, erratic, miserably slow connection, as far as Amazon is concerned, they've delivered. And availability means availability when it leaves Amazon's door; whether or not anything actually reaches your user is not Amazon's problem (regardless of their choices for ISP and connectivity). Oh, and the burden of proof is on you, the customer. For all intents and purposes, Amazon is not even checking to see if you even have service.

This is not to dump solely on Amazon. The same guarantees, or lack thereof, are typical of many cloud providers. In addition to the caveats above, scheduled and emergency downtime is excluded from availability guarantees; penalties for unavailability are minimal, and certainly not commensurate with potential business damages; and any other kind of performance is not included in the service level agreement.

An ideal cloud-client working relationship includes substantial SLAs, external monitoring of SLA parameters that is visible to both provider and client, and meaningful recourse if the service falls short. In lieu of this ideal, however, the onus is on the enterprise to put cloud monitoring and measurement in place and to hold their provider accountable – so they can either get the service level they need, or switch to a better provider.

Read More 

Internal Testing Program Using Real Devices

Creating an internal test program using real devices is a challenge. The devices have to be bought, carrier contracts have to be established, test scripts created, users trained, results compiled and analyzed — for each geographic market. And then the devices and contracts have to be dealt with after the testing is done, or maintained for ongoing monitoring.

This complexity is why so many enterprises use an outside test partner that offers an established infrastructure with hundreds or thousands of devices deployed over a broad geography. The test provider works with the client company to develop the necessary scripts, and then leases time to them on its network to run the tests. This is testing in the "public cloud," which means that many clients utilize the same devices and infrastructure to conduct their tests. It's an ideal solution for most companies — there's no upfront capital expenditure and tests can be quickly executed on demand, on a budget-friendly pay-per-use basis.

But when a company has particular security concerns and is reluctant to expose its data on a shared infrastructure, or if it has ongoing testing needs, a "private cloud"solution is in order. In this case, the test provider procures devices and contracts to create a private test network exclusively for the use of a particular client company.

In either case, the client team has ready online access to the entire process, from scripting to running the tests to reading results.

Cloud-based app testing is an automated process. There's no human being working the phones out in the field; rather, the devices are remotely operated by machine, performing the interactions specified in the test scripts and providing feedback on the devices' responses.

Read More at http://keynote.com/benchmark/mobile_wireless/article_mobile_app_performance.shtml