Helping Enterprises and Providers to Measure and Improve Voice Service Quality Over the Internet
San Jose, Calif., — March 16, 2006 — At the VON Spring 2006 Conference today, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), the worldwide leader in services that improve online business performance and communications technologies, announced Keynote Voice Perspective®, a monitoring service which helps enterprises and service providers measure and improve the voice quality delivered to end users using Voice over IP (VoIP) regardless of the underlying carrier technology, i.e., Internet phone calls made to traditional phones, wireless phones and other Internet phones. This is an important distinction as most VoIP calls today travel over hybrid networks. Keynote can measure customer experience of voice service quality for such a network.
Keynote Voice Perspective underscores the company's commitment to "The New Internet" by extending its measurement and monitoring expertise to increasingly popular communications technologies such as VoIP, streaming and wireless.
The proprietary technology for Voice Perspective was developed last year when Keynote conducted two groundbreaking competitive intelligence studies of VoIP quality and addressed the need to monitor the quality of voice calls from the end user perspective across IP data networks.
Voice Perspective is the only monitoring service that measures the complete voice path as it travels to and from end users through adapters, access networks, core networks, IP-PSTN gateways and IP-PSTN networks. The unique service allows providers to measure call quality between two end points regardless of whether the calls are VoIP to VoIP or hybrid calls, e.g., VoIP calls passing through PSTN, the traditional switched telephone network.
Voice Perspective helps voice providers and enterprise customers maintain service leadership, understand their performance relative to the competition and to focus on the customer experience by measuring voice quality as closely as possible to the actual end user. By monitoring voice quality from end to end, subscribers to the service will gain insights to fine tune their network infrastructure, reduce outages and improve call quality.
"A great deal of attention has been paid to VoIP because of the potentially large cost savings to businesses and consumers. However, at the end of the day call reliability and audio clarity remain critically important factors that limit the widespread adoption of VoIP due to consumer and business dissatisfaction and customer loss. Most other monitoring systems focus on network QoS, whereas our studies have shown that factors beyond the core network contribute to poor customer experiences," said Arun Bhardwaj, senior product manager at Keynote. "As the number of VoIP providers rises, consumers will have more choices and will switch providers if they do not receive the voice quality they desire. Enterprises who are switching to VoIP to reduce costs must choose service providers after careful consideration, since switching providers due to poor voice quality is extremely cost prohibitive. Our new service helps address these important issues."
Keynote Competitive VoIP Intelligence Studies help marketing and operations executives working within VoIP provider companies to understand the voice quality performance of their service relative to competitors, and to gauge the impact on the end-user experience of both their infrastructure investments in new markets and their enhancements to services in existing markets.
Voice Perspective is designed to help providers adopt an external focus and assure a quality experience for end users. Enterprises can use the studies to develop and implement best practices during their branch-office VoIP deployments and when rolling out converged customer-care applications and to maximize employee productivity and retain high customer satisfaction.
Voice Perspective capabilities include:
For more information about Voice Perspective view: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/voice_perspective.html
Availability and Pricing
Keynote VoIP Competitive Intelligence Studies offered as a subscription service are available today. Keynote Voice Perspective offering operational performance monitoring and SLA compliance reporting functionalities are available for limited release, and will be generally available in the summer of 2006.
The services are primarily priced based on number of monitoring locations and duration of service subscription.
To learn more about Keynote Voice Perspective, send an email to sales@keynote.com.
About Keynote
Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq "KEYN") is the worldwide leader in services that improve online business performance and communications technologies. Keynote helps approximately 2,300 corporate customers and 11,000 individual subscribers become "the best of the best" online. The business premise supporting Keynote's mission is: "Online businesses can't manage what they don't measure." As an independent and trusted third-party, Keynote provides IT and marketing executives with unbiased benchmarking data, competitive analysis and operational metrics from the customer perspective. This data measures service levels and customer experience of Web sites, broadband services and mobile communications.
Known as The Internet Performance Authority®, Keynote manages a market-leading infrastructure of 1,600+ measurement computers and mobile devices in over 114 locations and 66+ metropolitan areas worldwide that assess service levels and a panel of over 160,000 consumers who participate in interactive Web site tests that assess user experience. These online user experience tests capture customer attitude and behavior to answer the critical "why" behind the "what." Keynote's geographically distributed measurement services, on-site monitoring appliances, competitive intelligence and custom studies ensure that its customers outpace their competitors in online service levels and overall user experience.
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.
Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2006 Keynote Systems, Inc.
Editorial Contacts:
Della Lowe, Keynote Systems, (650) 403-3233 dlowe@keynote.com
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote, (650) 403-3305 dan.berkowitz@keynote.com