Mercury Interactive, a provider of Web performance management solutions, has announced that its Web testing solutions were selected by BlueLight.com, Kmart Corporation`s e-commerce company, to ensure reliability, scalability and optimum performance on BlueLight.com`s online shopping site. The thorough testing resulted in a 16-fold performance improvement on the BlueLight.com Phase One "preview" site within a 42-hour testing timeframe.
Volkmar Spieth, managing director of Mercury Interactive in South Africa, explains that, for the best possible end-user experience, BlueLight.com chose Mercury Interactive`s ActiveTest, the hosted load testing e-service, to design and execute production-level loads in order to predetermine the capabilities, thresholds and optimal configuration of the BlueLight.com architecture.
"The goal of this effort was to ensure that the maximum number of people would have the best possible user experience with the online shopping destination," he says.
"The combination of Mercury Interactive technology and the talent that make up the ActiveTest e-service pushed our online storefront to its limits and helped us identify and solve potential capacity and performance problems within our Web server, application server, database server and network," according to Ghufran Ahmed, vice-president of engineering at BlueLight.com.
"We turned to Mercury Interactive and found that, through its expertise and recommendations, we not only saved resources and time but we were also able to improve our Web site`s performance by orders of magnitude within two days."
"Even a couple of minutes of downtime can be debilitating to an e-commerce site anticipating thousands of hits per minute," adds Spieth.
"E-businesses like BlueLight.com must focus on maximum customer satisfaction and loyalty to stay competitive. Using our Web testing solutions to optimise its site`s performance helps ensure BlueLight.com`s success."
Hosted e-service provides testing on tap ActiveTest is a hosted e-service in which all testing is done remotely over the Web by Mercury Interactive`s load testing experts. This eliminates the need for costly in-house hardware, software and resources - and is in step with the growing trend for outsourced e-services, a market that is expected to grow to $47.6 billion in 2002, according to Forrester Research.
Mercury Interactive`s experienced load testing staff works with in-house personnel to define load scenarios, develop test scripts, manage the testing process, and provide recommendations for optimum performance. The load servers are hosted at primary first-tier Internet Service Providers, using bandwidth of up to four gigabytes per second. ActiveTest can emulate a system load of more than 4 000 transactions per second and more than three billion Web hits per day.
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BlueLight.com
Based in San Francisco, BlueLight.com is the first e-commerce company to fully integrate the assets of a real-world retail partner, Kmart Corporation, with its own superior online resources. BlueLight.com`s shopping site (www.bluelight.com) features thousands of products across multiple categories, including Martha Stewart Everyday and other nationally recognised brands. BlueLight.com`s e-commerce site is supported by its Totally Free Internet Service, which is the fastest growing Internet service in US history, with nearly three million subscribers. BlueLight.com was formed in 1999 by Kmart Corporation and SOFTBANK Venture Capital with investments by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. and a relationship with Yahoo! Inc.
Mercury Interactive
Mercury Interactive is the leading provider of Web performance management solutions that help e-businesses deliver a positive user experience. Mercury Interactive solutions turn Web application performance, scalability and user experience into competitive advantage. The company`s performance management products and hosted services are open and integrated to best test and monitor business-critical Web applications More than 10 000 business to business and business to consumer e-businesses, Internet Service Providers, Applications Service Providers, systems integrators, and consultants use Mercury Interactive solutions Mercury Interactive is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and has 40 offices worldwide. The company can be reached at www.mercuryinteractive.com, or see SA editorial contact details below :