Derek Vaughan, reporting for Webanalyticsbook.com recently interviewed Vik Chaudhary, Vice President of Product Management and Corporate Development at Keynote Systems to determine what this successful anaytics company has been up to lately in website and mobile analytics. Below is Part II of Derek’s interview. Interview part I can be read here.
Derek Vaughan: When I used to work at The Walt Disney Company, we used Keynote products to monitor website performance. That gave me the impression that Keynote products are for very large corporations versus smaller web sites. Is this the case?
Vik Chaudhary: Glad to hear that you have some experience with using us. However, we have a variety of products and services which are well suited for everyone, from a huge enterprise like Disney to a developer who is designing his first application for the iPhone.
Keynote has over 2,800 customers, from companies that spend as little as $50 per month for Keynote to monitor the availability of their web site, to companies that spend many times more than that. Performance is imperative to everyone, so we do our best to offer products that meet every need at every price point – even free!
Derek: Who is the ideal customer for Keynote?
Vik: The ideal customer for Keynote is any person or company that is committed to offering a superior Web experience. As I mentioned, we offer a variety of products and services that serve different audiences, whether a huge company or a single person developing a new application.
For example, a large retailer with a lot of resources gearing up for the holiday shopping would benefit from a combination of services like LoadPro, Application Perspective and Transaction Perspective.
A developer, however, with a single site or application could leverage a free service such as KITE (the Keynote Internet Test Environment) and have a clear picture of exactly how his offering is performing from any cloud, anywhere in the world as well as the ability to drill down into each element so he can perfect the performance. If they decide to use Keynote’s ongoing site monitoring service they can easily move their KITE scripts to the ‘for pay’ Transaction Perspective and Application Perspective services that allow for measurements from more geographies and Internet backbones and allow for a deeper dive into diagnosing performance problems when they do occur (as well as sophisticated alerting so you are notified asap when site problems are occurring).
Derek: What new products or services can we expect to see from Keynote in the near future?
Vik: In recent years, Keynote has expanded its products from testing and measuring Web sites and applications to other media – such as online video, live streaming events, voice-enabled (VoIP) applications, mobile content and applications, and wireless operator networks. We’re concentrating on enhancing our current offerings with new functionality and features. Of course, we’re always expanding and perfecting our measurement network as well.
Derek: Are there any new products or services that have recently launched that you can point out for Webanalyticsbook.com readers?
Vik:
We’ve recently launched two new offerings that are great on-ramps to our test and measurement services that Webanalyticsbook.com readers would benefit from. Recently, we announced we are opening our cloud infrastructure, offering any Web team concerned with their end users’ experience free access to KITE (Keynote Interactive Testing Environment), Keynote’s product for testing and analyzing the performance of Web applications across the Internet cloud.
KITE users can upload Web transaction scripts from the desktop to the Keynote global test and measurement network and receive free instant performance data from both their desktop as well as San Francisco, New York, London, Frankfurt and Hong Kong. And because the Keynote test and measurement network spans the globe, KITE users can upload the same scripts to 240 locations worldwide to continue monitoring and gathering performance data globally. The top five technical features of KITE include:
• Test performance from both the desktop and the Internet cloud;
• Performance analysis for multi-page Web transactions;
• Native Internet Explorer integration allows for the easy analysis of AJAX, Flash and JavaScript;
• JavaScript programmability for scripting actions based on DOM events (Document Object Model); and
• Record Web application test scripts, playback in ‘burst mode,’ and share scripts across internal and external groups.
In the mobile arena, we have MITE (Mobile Interactive testing Environment), which we launched in September. MITE is the industry’s first desktop testing tool that allows mobile developers to interactively test and validate mobile content over the Internet or live carrier networks, and across more than 1,000 mobile device profiles, in order to quickly understand the end user experience. With Keynote MITE, users can:
• Test and validate mobile content quickly and easily across multiple device profiles;
• Reduce cost and time to market while helping to deliver a better end user experience;
• Emulate more than 1,600 device profiles from the continuously updated mobile device profile library;
• Create new device and network profiles from the desktop for instantaneous feedback;
• See download times for the entire page and all the redirections the browser took to download the mobile site;
• Record and playback scripts with advanced scripting features such as conditioning coding;
• Send and receive SMS messages to audit common short codes.
Derek: How important are mobile products?
Vik: Mobile test and measurement is extremely important, not only for our business, but also to hasten end users adoption of using their handsets to access the Internet and conduct transactions on them. As we see increasingly sophisticated handsets and applications being offered, it’s imperative to ensure that consumers are having the best possible experience when they go online. After a few poor experiences, it takes a while for them to try again, which equates to lost revenue for everyone, as well as consumer frustration with some major brands.
Mobile is the way of the future, no one will argue that, but in order to make the transition seamless, we need to be diligent and ensure everything is performing the same we way we have come to expect it to perform from out desktops.
With all of that in mind, we have built out the largest on demand test and measurement network. Keynote and our subsidiary Keynote SIGOS gives customers the ability to test mobile performance over 200 mobile networks across more than 70 countries. Keynote’s global network is comprised of real and emulated devices, user-provided SIMs and wireless modems, providing an unparalleled and customizable view into the performance of mobile content, applications and services.
Derek: Is this the greatest growth area for Keynote?
Vik: Mobile is actually the main driver of our revenue growth; it increased 61 percent in the fourth quarter alone and 63 percent in the year as a whole. Of course, we still have our strong base in the traditional Web site test and measurement space (as well as our Keynote Competitive Research offering, which is our industry analysis arm), but as more and more people are turning to the mobile Web, we’re seeing incredible opportunity.
Derek Vaughan is a guestblogger here at Webanalyticsbook.com. The author would like to thank Vik Chaudhary, Nicole Colwell and Haroon Chohan for their contributions to this piece. Derek is an expert in website hosting services and is currently on the Advisory Board of HostingCon.com. If you want to be a guest blogger contact us.
