Keynote Appoints New Vice President

Keynote Systems (keynote.com), the worldwide leader in services that improve online business performance and communications technologies, announced that Jeff Kraatz, former managing director of North Asia for voice messaging leader Lucent and Octel Communications, and network services company SPRINT, has been named vice president and managing director for the Asia Pacific region for Keynote.

"Keynote has made a significant investment in its measurement infrastructure in Asia because of the strong demand from its base of global customers who represent over 70% of the world's top Web sites and over 50% of the Fortune 100 companies. We see our Asia Pacific business growing to become a significant part of Keynote in the next few years," said Patrick Quirk, executive vice president of worldwide customer operations at Keynote.

Quirk continued, "Both the timing and the market is right for Keynote to place strategic emphasis on Asia. With Keynote's aggressive approach to developing new channels, finding strategic partners in worldwide markets, and demand pull from service providers for wireless measurements, voice over Internet protocol and streaming media services, it was important to recruit a seasoned executive with Jeff's skills and experience who could build a diverse organization to serve enterprise customers, portals and service providers. Jeff's appointment will enable Keynote to increase its presence in the Asia Pacific markets just as those markets are poised for growth."

"Asia represents the fastest growing Internet population, deep broadband penetration, and the largest number of sophisticated mobile users in the world. Innovation in Asia is the mantra of business leaders as well as from developing markets — and convergence of the Internet, communications and media are all pushing the envelope throughout the region," said Jeff Kraatz.

Kraatz notes that the existing KeyNet measurement network across 17 geographical locations in Asia Pacific is operational and providing a quality infrastructure for customers and partners to leverage today.

The dynamic and competitive consumer and business environment of each Asian market creates an atmosphere of explosive growth tempered with the realism that businesses and service providers must give customers a quality user experience to avoid churn and maximize profits.

During the course of his career, Kraatz held a variety of senior management positions, including those at Octel Communications, where he built successful channel programs, ran national accounts operations, and based in Hong Kong built Octel into a mature Service Provider market leader in Asia for five years prior to an acquisition by Lucent Technologies.