Keynote Systems Doubles Capacity of Website Load Testing Service

Service Can Help Vendors Test Their Websites Prior to Holiday Season

WebKnowHow
Wednesday, July 19, 2006; 06:07 AM

Keynote Systems announced the doubling in capacity of its flagship load testing service, LoadPro, allowing online retailers and other online businesses to simulate millions of users accessing their Web sites. To highlight this upgrade, Keynote announced the launch of a load testing promotion offering qualified customers a proof of concept load test worth up to $20,000 to demonstrate why Keynote’s load testing services provide accuracy and realism. In conjunction with the load testing promotion, the company also issued an invitation to online retailers and other IT professionals to register for and attend a timely and informative Webinar on the subject, “Preparing Your Web site for Peak Holiday Traffic.”

Keynote’s load testing service, LoadPro, is now able to realistically emulate millions of visitors and is also able to provide online retailers with a view into the shopping behaviors of end users by utilizing Keynote’s proprietary behavioral profiling and abandonment modeling techniques. With the upgrade, Keynote has added three new cities: Seattle, Denver and Miami, for a total of ten locations across five Tier-1 backbones, as well as increasing network bandwidth capacity by almost 60%. For Keynote’s self-service, pay-as-you-go, load testing service, Test Perspective, testing capacity has doubled to more than 20,000 virtual users.

With the holiday season approaching – Black Friday is only 130 days away and counting – online retailers have a pressing need to ensure that their e-business platform is up to the challenges posed by significant increases in traffic and transactions that occur from Thanksgiving through the end of the year. If their Web site fails to handle peak holiday traffic, they risk losing a once-a-year opportunity. This knowledge is underscored by a recent report from Nielsen/NetRatings and Harris Interactive, the 5th annual “Holiday eSpending Report,” which states that fourth-quarter sales are especially important to the bottom line of online retailers, with sales of $30 billion in Q4 2005 – up 30% from 2004.

The importance of fourth quarter sales to online retailers is further magnified when considering the overall growth of online holiday shopping. Nielsen/NetRatings reported that in 2005 traffic to online shopping sites on Black Friday grew 29% to 17.2 million visitors, up from 13.3 million a year before. Evidence also points to the fact that the holiday rush begins earlier online than it does in bricks-and-mortar locations. According to a survey of online retailers from July 2005, over 25% of respondents believed online shopping would start in August or September, and over 60% stated they believed the season would start before November 1.

This preponderance of evidence reinforces the need for online business to make plans to test their e-business infrastructure early and often, or risk affecting their bottom line. “Crossing your fingers and hoping that your online business is ready for the holiday rush is not enough for online retailers to ensure that their systems can handle the inevitable increase in traffic and provide a positive customer experience,” said Vik Chaudhary, vice president of marketing and product management at Keynote. “By testing their Web application infrastructure before the wave crashes in November, online retailers can rest assured that they can handle peak load conditions and reap the rewards of the continued growth of online holiday shopping.”