SAN MATEO, Calif., — December 3, 2003 — Keynote (Nasdaq “KEYN”), the worldwide leader in Web performance measurement and management services, announced today that it has acquired Xaffire’s “Insight Services suite,” originally developed by Matrix NetSystems. Xaffire was formed by the April 2003 combination of Matrix NetSystems and Alignment Software. Keynote also announced that the Insight Services suite is immediately available to enterprise customers under the re-branded name “Keynote Network Perspective®.”
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Xaffire’s Insight Services suite leverages a worldwide network of measurement computers, or “beacons,” placed on the public Internet, or anywhere within a company’s private network, to provide detailed performance statistics and diagnostics on Internet transit from many different ISPs and geographical locations.
Xaffire’s advanced technology “beacons,” acting very much like geographically dispersed radar stations that send and receive Internet transit information, have the ability to determine latency, packet loss and reachability between any origination point and any destination (using HTTP Get Requests, TCP Open, ICMP Echo and traceroute) and deliver detailed and highly granular diagnostic data regarding network performance should problems occur. Insight Services show ALL network delays, from the first ISP to the second, the second to the third, the third to the fourth ISP and so on, all the way to the client Web site.
Xaffire’s Insight Services suite measures performance from network agent locations to any ping-able device including ISP peering and service routers, access routers, firewalls, load balancers and so on. It is an aggregated “health check’ of an ISP’s network. The services are sold to both ISPs who need to understand the performance of their own network, and to e-businesses who need to ensure that service level objectives are met.
“The acquisition of Xaffire’s ‘Insight Services’ is an enhancement to our company’s overall portfolio of services for Web performance measurement and management, and underscores the continued expansion of our value proposition from performance benchmarking to total performance management,” said Umang Gupta, chairman and CEO of Keynote. “We will now be able to offer a deeper and more granular Internet diagnostics tool that we’ll sell separately for network engineers, as well as bundle with our existing Keynote enterprise solutions services. We are now in an even better position to serve as an intermediary between large enterprise customers, and their critically important partner Web sites and their ISPs, by helping to quickly find the ‘smoking gun’ when a problem exists on the public Internet.”
More About Insight Services
Insight Services measures the actual IP transit delays between all the elements that lie between the measurement agent and the customer’s Web site. If the latency or packet loss is out-of-bounds (over the performance threshold), the customer will know very clearly and quickly that the problem is caused by Sprint, AT&T, UUNET or whichever culpable service provider. In essence, the service delivers the ‘smoking gun’ when network performance is the problem. The Insight Services performance measurement infrastructure collects over 500 million Internet measurements a day and delivers highly granular Internet diagnostic data, down to the router and load balancer level, which helps in the fast identification and resolution of critical Web-based applications experiencing performance-related issues.
Keynote Network Perspective Now Available
Keynote will immediately offer Insight Services suite under the brand name Network Perspective, as the service will provide network engineers charged with running optimally performing networks with a rich level of Internet diagnostic data, analysis and reporting from the end user ‘perspective.’ The service is immediately available.
Additionally, Network Perspective will be sold as part of “incident packs” supplied as part of Keynote Diagnostic Services. Network Perspective is an ideal outside-the-firewall complement to the diagnostic data available through Keynote’s recently announced Application Perspective service, which provides extremely advanced application problem identification and diagnostics inside the firewall. Over time, Network Perspective will be integrated with Keynote’s other measurement, monitoring and management solutions.
Network Perspective is the latest addition to Keynote’s growing line of Total Performance Management solutions, a holistic approach to Web performance management that includes a broad portfolio of cost-effective measurement, monitoring, diagnostic, load testing, content quality testing and usability testing services.
About Total Performance Management
In today’s tight economy, 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, diagnostic, 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, Inc., (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.
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.
Public Relations Contact:
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com
Investor Relations Contact:
Erin Kasenchak, Keynote Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3314, ekasenchak@keynote.com