SOASTA, a leader in performance analytics, announced the Winter 2016 release of its Digital Performance Management (DPM) Platform. The new release introduces a series of enhancements and services to help digital businesses meet the growing demand for the ultimate measure of performance – the customer experience.
“We’re in the era of Digital Performance Management, and it requires a new mind set, with new solutions designed to deliver great user experiences. Companies that fail to keep up with the demands of online consumers will deliver lousy customer experiences and, as a result, will not thrive,” warned SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos. “Websites and mobile applications need to be improved and optimized constantly, and that requires modern-day DPM technologies and skills.”
This product announcement is part of a broader SOASTA strategy that to empowers digital businesses by giving them the contextual intelligence they need to maximize performance and revenue – in real time and at scale. Digital Performance Management is the evolutionary next step from traditional Application Performance Management (APM). Fueled by the DevOps philosophy and Agile methodology, DPM is a data-centric approach to performance management in which web and mobile applications are continuously measured, tested and optimized to deliver the best possible user experience and business outcome.
The SOASTA DPM platform enables continuous measurement and improvement of digital performance – starting with an understanding of real users and combining that with the ability to predict and prevent performance and functionality issues before they occur. SOASTA’s DPM platform is designed to offer monitoring, testing and optimization capabilities to ensure continuous delivery of peak performance.
“We are significantly enhancing the SOASTA DPM platform, extending the capabilities of the number one cloud testing platform in the world with this release,” said Lounibos. “It perfectly illustrates our ‘monitor-test-optimize’ approach to continuous performance management and maximizing digital performance and, accordingly, revenue.”
The SOASTA platform consists of five key technologies – mPulse, CloudTest, TouchTest, Digital Operations Center (DOC) and Data Science Workbench – working in concert to provide continuous performance delivery. Enhancements to two of these technologies, mPulse and CloudTest, are the highlights of the Winter 2016 release.
mPulse real user monitoring (RUM) collects and analyzes 100% of the front-end performance data from every web and mobile user and correlates this data with critical business metrics – all in real time. As a result, the site owner always has a clear view of what’s working, what isn’t, and what to do next.
CloudTest provides a powerful, flexible and affordable platform for continuous load testing – including real-time analytics, a visual test creation environment, dynamic test- grid provisioning and the ability to pause and restart tests in production.
“With this new release, we are delivering better DevOps, improved agility and optimal business performance,” Lounibos explained, “with a greater emphasis on ease of onboarding, implementation and use.”
The new SOASTA mPulse enhancements make Big Data insights easy to visualize, access and share. mPulse democratizes insights about aggregated end user experiences, making performance analytics available to all. Instead of siloing information within groups, SOASTA mPulse with embedded Data Science Workbench reports help enterprises isolate issues, triage performance problems, and make decisions based on a better understanding of the customer.
The most notable benefits of the Winter 2016 release are DevOps productivity enhancements, with unlimited alerts to easy “exception management,” fully integrated with popular tools such as PagerDuty and Slack. This enables DevOps teams to better manage workflows and respond to and resolve incidents faster, while dramatically improving productivity.
The SOASTA CloudTest load and performance testing technology now extends its support of continuous performance testing with SOASTA’s patented cloud provisioning system, accessible from continuous integration environments. The release delivers several significant new capabilities, including:
• Native service level agreement (SLA) support for comparing results against baseline quality requirements
• Faster provisioning and support for SOASTA partners, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google and Rackspace
• Integration with popular Continuous Integration (CI) automation tools such as Jenkins, Atlassian Bamboo and Microsoft Visual Studio • • • Online and the ability to script starting and stopping load generators in the SOASTA cloud for “hands-off” performance testing
“SOASTA’s approach to DPM allows us to continuously measure and improve our digital experience. The integration between these tools helps us see how our real users are doing and take action before issues arise,” said James Erb, UI consultant and Sephora mobile technology director. “We have found ways to improve client-side performance time by over 20% as a result of having SOASTA’s solution in place.”
“Effective analytics across mobile, web and other environments are essential to optimizing performance and enabling successful DevOps execution,” said Melinda Ballou, program director for IDC’s Application Lifecycle Management & Executive Strategies Service. “Automation and insight across a broad portfolio such as SOASTA’s – coupled with appropriate process and organizational strategies – are key to visibility and support for digital transformation with quality software delivery.
SOASTA DPM Platform is available immediately with offerings that include SOASTA CloudTest™ for integrated load testing, SOASTA mPulse™ for real user monitoring, SOASTA TouchTest™ for mobile performance and functional test automation, SOASTA Data Science Workbench for advanced performance analytics, SOASTA DOC™ for unified presentation of all aspects of digital performance, and installation and consulting services. For more information about the SOASTA DPM Platform, please visit: http://www.soasta.com/performance-platform
@drnatalie petouhoff
covering customer experience and performance management