SAN MATEO, California — June 15, 2004 — Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), the worldwide leader in Web performance measurement and management services announced today that Sun Country Airlines, a scheduled service airline based in Minneapolis/St. Paul has chosen Keynote’s new Application Perspective® Outside Edition service to assure a high level of customer service and Web site accessibility.
“Our Web site is mission critical to our business as we drive more and more customers to it. Sun Country will not use anything to monitor it, develop it or test it without thoroughly investigating its value and being sure that it supports a mission critical application,” said Mark Ondrey, Director of IT for Sun Country Airlines. “We took a good look at the services out there and found the features and value we needed in Application Perspective.”
Sun Country offers e-ticket sales, flight information and Web check-in from its Web site as well as providing travel packages, car and hotel add-ons and access for travel agents, booking over 30% of its passengers a month. Its greatly increased presence on the Web over the last two years has intensified the need to monitor large number of transactions on its Web site to make absolutely certain that the site performs well and is available. That is critical to making it useful not only for customers but also for employees who need to access information on its extranet from all over the country.
“Sun Country has added more functionality to the Web site and greatly increased traffic on our Web over the last two years making it essential to monitor the site closely to maintain excellent customer service and address problems proactively, yet cost effectively. Keynote Application Perspective was our choice,” said Ondrey.
“Keynote’s distributed network and flexible geographic scheduling of measurements was an important selling point because our data center is in the Midwest, yet the cities we serve range from Anchorage to Miami and about 25 cities in between – including Mexico and the Caribbean. Keynote’s ability to monitor a high volume of Web transactions from that geographic region was critical,” Ondrey continued. “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.”
Sun Country monitors dozens of transactions in three or four step processes every few minutes both on its public Web site and for internal applications (extranet) used by its employees and vendors who are spread out around the country. It needed to find a way to do this in a cost effective way.
E-ticketing, customer service, and its internal flight information systems are all Web based. More than thirty percent of all the flights booked on Sun Country are booked on its own Web site. Using Application Perspective, Sun Country was able to look at specific objects on a page at specific times of day and determine which ones were failing and at what time, leading it to determine areas where scalability was a problem and correct the problem.
According to Ondrey, “It is important to Sun Country to maintain better than average up times and that the process of finding a flight meets or exceeds our customer expectations. We needed a way to monitor many transactions and receive clear and actionable data. We completed a very thorough evaluation of several vendors, including Gomez, and Keynote stood out in all respects – data, alerts, pricing and tech support. The alerts and diagnostics we receive from Application Perspective help us to maintain the level of service we set for ourselves and to validate the service level agreements with our vendors. Application Perspective is easy to use and the detail provided gives us the ability to triage a problem efficiently and at the correct level.”
“By broadening the geographic locations available for us to measure our site’s performance with Outside Edition, we are able to assure that our destination cities can successfully access our site quickly and reliably. The Keynote service is a vital component of our proactive approach to customer and enterprise application maintenance. Sun Country is already realizing a significant return by reducing site downtime and pinpointing potential trouble spots, rather than waiting for a problem to surface.”
About Keynote’s Application Perspective
Platform
The Keynote Application Perspective platform is
the industry’s most comprehensive, end-to-end monitoring and root
cause diagnostics solution for e-business applications at the lowest
total cost of ownership. The platform consists of three modules that
can be purchased and used independent of one another: Application
Perspective Outside Edition, Application Private Edition (a high
throughput transaction monitoring agent that can be placed anywhere
a customer desires inside or outside the firewall), and Application
Perspective for HP Openview, a version tightly integrated with HP’s
OpenView Transaction Analyzer product, that facilitates deep
diagnostics behind the firewall when application performance
problems occur.
About Application Perspective Outside
Edition
Keynote Application Perspective Outside Edition
is an affordable, self-service, outside the firewall, Web
transaction monitoring service that measures the ‘response time’ and
‘success rate’ for performing Web transactions from multiple
geographic locations worldwide. Additionally, the service provides
sophisticated trending, alarming and reporting essential for the
rapid triage, diagnosis and repair of performance issues when they
do occur. The service addresses the growing challenges of
monitoring, managing and optimizing the performance of today’s
increasingly complex 24/7 e-business applications. Application
Perspective Outside Edition is the most cost-effective and robust
Web transaction monitoring service on the market today.
Application Perspective Outside Edition leverages the same high-volume transaction monitoring agent used with Application Perspective Private Edition, providing customers a true apples-to-apples, real time comparison of transaction performance, from the end user perspective, both inside and outside the firewall. This capability is unique to any service solution currently on the market and represents the “Holy Grail” for many enterprise companies seeking to closely manage and optimize their Web-based applications.
Pricing
Keynote Application Perspective
Outside Edition is available now. Pricing starts at $70 per page
from 5 U.S. cities at 15 minute frequency ($350 for a five page
transaction) and $100 per page from 10 U.S. cities also at 15 minute
frequency ($500 for a five page transaction).
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.
Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at http://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.
Public Relations Contacts:
Della Lowe,
Keynote Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3233, dlowe@keynote.com
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote Systems, Inc., (650)
403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com