San Mateo,
California, March 23, 2004 - Eastern Bank, the largest, full-service independent
bank in New England has turned once again to Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:
KEYN), the worldwide leader in Web performance measurement and management
services, to assure a high level of customer service and Web site accessibility.
Eastern offers a full range of financial products - many online - for
consumers, businesses, investors, government agencies and non-profits
and its number one priority is to maintain its competitive advantage by
providing outstanding quality of service to its thousands of online customers.
“At Eastern
we want to know about and address problems before our customers do. We
continue to expand and add to the sophisticated financial products we
offer, but need to make sure we manage the expansion and transitions smoothly,”
said Marc DeCastro, vice president of eCommerce at Eastern. “Keynote helps
us do that.”
Poor customer
service is the antithesis of Eastern Bank’s mission, so when Eastern Bank
wanted to launch a next generation business banking platform for one of
its solutions, it turned to Keynote Test Perspective®, a cost-effective,
pay-as-you-go hosted load testing solution. Test Perspective allowed Eastern
to run highly realistic load tests using Keynote’s geographically distributed
infrastructure on the Internet.
“This bank
differentiates itself on customer service and personal attention whether
in the bank or on the Web. It is mission critical that we keep the site
secure, available and fully functioning,” said DeCastro. “We take a proactive
approach to problem solving instead of a reactive that results in increased
customer satisfaction and retention. We look, therefore, for reliable
outsourced services that can help us do that with the least investment
in time or money so that we can stick to our core business. We found that
in Keynote. Not only do Keynote services deliver what they promise, but
support and follow-up are also outstanding.”
Eastern Bank
had been using Keynote Red Alert™ monitoring very successfully for several
years to help manage its Web site. It was logical, therefore, for Eastern
to approach Keynote again to assure that it could handle an expected increase
in users when rolling out a new business application.
“Flexibility
was key to our choice of Keynote Test Perspective for our load testing.
We could schedule test when we wanted them, make changes to our scripts
quickly and have them up and running,” continued DeCastro.
The web application
Eastern was testing had a login feature that could not be simulated by
traditional load testing software. It used session IDs to prevent simultaneous
access from a single location making a distributed load testing infrastructure
an imperative.
“We looked
at software solutions and found that they could not do what Keynote could.
Software is simply not as good when you are dealing with complex transactions
and sessions IDs. With commercial banking applications, most customers
will log on at the same time, say between 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. We had to
mimic what happens with a launch of an application with a much larger
customer base, logging on simultaneously and see the results in real time
in order to validate the performance that we know customers would demand.”
“Keynote’s
distributed network and flexible geographic scheduling was an important
selling point because the data center for our application vendor was in
the Southeast and most of our customer base is in the Northeast. Keynote’s
ability to create load from that geographic region was critical. And because
Keynote’s script recorder is so easy to use, we were able to streamline
the script development process which got us up and running quickly.”
“Test Perspective
gave us exactly what we needed – a fast, accurate way to validate that
our system could handle the load we anticipated at the times of day we
anticipated it. We were able to implement our application with the confidence
that customers are not going to cripple our system when they all log on
at the same time or worse, get frustrated because they cannot log on.
And we did this ourselves with a self-service load test solution at about
half the cost of finding someone to do it for us.”
About Test
Perspective
Load testing of Web applications is critical to the success of an e-business.
Without conducting capacity testing, site managers have no way to assure
their Web sites can successfully handle peak amounts of site traffic.
In the past, Web site crashes due to unexpected bursts of traffic, called
‘flash load,’ and other causes have resulted in millions of dollars in
lost revenue and market capitalization for large enterprises.
Test Perspective
is a cost-effective, hosted load testing service that makes it easy to
stress test Web applications and quickly validate functionality, availability
and performance.
Test Perspective
delivers accurate and realistic traffic using a real-world randomized
arrival rate methodology and allows for generating load either on-site
or remotely from Keynote’s geographically distributed locations. Test
Perspective is part of Keynote’s integrated solutions that provide enterprise
customers with ‘Total Performance Management’ for increasing the return
on investment of their e-business initiatives.
Pricing
Keynote Test Perspective is an affordable pay-as-you-go hosted service
with subscription pricing starting at $7,500 for a three-month subscription
and hours-based pricing starting at $2,500 for a 10-hour block of testing.
About Total
Performance Management
Keynote’s services provide enterprise customers with Total Performance
Management (TPM) solutions that increase return on investment, save money
and efficiently link IT resources to e-business goals. TPM is a holistic
approach to Web performance management that includes a broad portfolio
of cost-effective measurement, monitoring, load testing, content quality
testing and usability testing services. Keynote’s overarching goal is
to empower customers to deliver an optimal quality of experience to end
users and to gain competitive advantage, while helping them reduce unnecessary
capital expenditures and leverage existing enterprise management software.
About Keynote
Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq “KEYN”), The Internet Performance
Authority®, is the worldwide leader in Web performance measurement and
management services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote’s
services enable corporate enterprises to monitor, benchmark, test, diagnose
and optimize their e-business systems both inside and outside the firewall.
Approximately 2,200 corporate IT departments and 17,000 individual subscribers
rely on the company's easy-to-use and cost-effective services to increase
revenues and reduce downtime costs, without requiring additional complex
and costly software implementations.
The Keynote
brand is recognized as The Internet Performance Authority because of the
large number of Internet performance measurements its global infrastructure
of over 1,600 measurement computers in 50 cities worldwide captures and
stores on a daily basis (over 40 million at last count); frequent citations
in the mass media regarding Web site and Internet performance; and its
broad and growing range of market-leading Internet performance indices
for various vertical markets. (http://www.keynote.com/solutions/solutions_pi_index.html)
Keynote Systems,
Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at www.keynote.com
or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
Keynote,
The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks
of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective
owners. © 2004 Keynote Systems, Inc.
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