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Global Internet Performance Conference (GIPC) East, NEW YORK CITY — October 28, 2002 — At the opening today of its GIPC East event, Keynote Systems™ (Nasdaq:KEYN) announced WebEffective™, a new online user experience testing service based on the acquisition of Enviz, a privately held company based in Redwood City, Calif. WebEffective has uniquely new capabilities, offered by no other vendor, that provides a far deeper understanding into how real users behave on Web sites, and why. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Enviz is the technology leader for measuring and analyzing Quality of Experience of Web site end users. Keynote is the market leader in Internet performance management services and now adds WebEffective to its growing line of Web performance testing solutions for enterprise companies.
WebEffective determines whether a Web site is effective in meeting business goals and quickly identifies site effectiveness problems. The solution is delivered as a service or hosted application and enables enterprise companies to test, understand and improve the total quality of user experience delivered by their complex e-business Web sites. The service provides a comprehensive understanding of what real users do and why. It helps e-businesses understand what users expect and want, if customers are accomplishing their goals, and how they are interacting with key business processes.
WebEffective is perfectly complementary to Keynote's extensive benchmarking, diagnosing, testing and application performance management services, which all enable operations and IT staff to optimize the technical performance of a Web site. The WebEffective service enables line of business owners and developers to optimize the experience, design and usability of a Web site.
"We are pleased to continue to execute on our strategy to bring customers the best in Web performance management services that are cost-effective and easy-to-use," said Umang Gupta, chairman and CEO for Keynote. "User experience is a critical component of the overall quality of a Web site. With our announcements today of both WebEffective, a Web site user experience testing solution, and Enterprise HTML Toolbox, a Web content and integrity testing solution, we now provide our customers with the best and widest range of Web performance testing services for optimizing the quality of e-business; all available on a completely outsourced basis."
WebEffective confirms that Keynote is delivering on its promise of Total Performance Management (TPM) made at its GIPC West event held in San Francisco in June. TPM is comprised of end-to-end solutions delivered by Keynote and KeyPartners for benchmarking, diagnosing, testing and managing the end-to-end performance of e-business applications and systems.
Today Keynote also introduced Enterprise HTML Toolbox, a new appliance-based Web site integrity testing service, and Test Perspective™ 5.0, an updated version of its self-service Web site load testing solution (see separate press releases issued today). With the introduction of WebEffective and Enterprise HTML Toolbox, Keynote has expanded the realm of performance testing to include capacity load testing and now Web site effectiveness and content integrity testing as well.
About WebEffective
WebEffective is a testing service for diagnosing and improving Web effectiveness by testing the total quality of user experience, capturing everything the user sees and does: how users interact with pages, how users navigate (including back and forward buttons), where they encounter difficulty with navigation, why they do not complete key business processes, and whether their needs are met. Questions may be asked, in context, of users to diagnose reasons for user actions.
WebEffective's methodology is an iterative process, providing the ability to rapidly test the effectiveness of key site processes. WebEffective provides actionable and business-relevant diagnostics to improve site navigation, prioritize features and content and optimize the success rate of key business processes. All this enables WebEffective to deliver powerful models of how users really experience a site.
WebEffective is an ideal solution for companies with complex, mission-critical Web sites in which optimizing the user experience is a significant and sophisticated problem. Sites that can benefit most from the service are dynamic and database-backed and are either high-volume with many low-value transactions, or low-volume with high-value transactions. Typical industries that could benefit from the service include technology, pharmaceutical, financial services and automotive.
WebEffective is complementary to traditional Web analytics monitoring tools such as WebTrends, which are used for on-going reporting of macro-level site metrics such as traffic volume, page hits and basic click-stream information. WebEffective is a far superior method for collecting, reporting and testing user experience than traditional approaches such as focus groups or user panels because it evaluates the behavior of actual Web site users, rather than panelists who attempt to simulate real user behavior.
Availability and Pricing
Keynote WebEffective is available now and engagements typically begin at $25,000.
Keynote Systems, Inc.
Keynote Systems (Nasdaq "KEYN"), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the worldwide leader in Internet performance management services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote's services enable corporate enterprises to benchmark, diagnose, test and manage their e-business systems both inside and outside the firewall. More than 2,400 corporate IT departments and 18,000 individual subscribers rely on the company's easy-to-use and cost-effective services to optimize revenues and reduce downtime costs without requiring additional complex and costly software implementations.
Keynote Systems, Inc. was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The company can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
© 2002 Keynote Systems, Inc. The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks. Keynote Systems and WebEffective are trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Editorial Contact:
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com