Mercury Interactive launches first production tuning service

Mercury Interactive, the leading provider of enterprise testing and application performance management solutions, today launched ActiveTune, the industry`s first service designed specifically to tune the performance of production systems.

ActiveTune, which can be delivered remotely via the Internet or onsite through highly experienced Mercury Interactive consultants, tunes every tier and each component of a live production system`s architecture systematically to optimise the performance of infrastructure, application and security components that impact the business. This allows ActiveTune customers to achieve superior reliability and increased system capacity with existing software, hardware, and personnel resulting in tangible cost savings.

"Nearly every application today is deployed to facilitate business and is ultimately designed to generate revenue or save costs," said Theresa Lanowitz, research director at Gartner. "Ironically, even applications that follow a rigorous quality assurance process, often fail to perform to expectations once launched in to the final production environment, which ultimately results in money lost."

Based on knowledge gleaned from thousands of load tests conducted with the company`s hosted Web-based load testing service, ActiveTest, 68% of which were conducted on live production systems, Mercury Interactive`s performance experts estimate that 70% of performance issues on production systems can be resolved through tuning alone.

"Providing superior customer service and a convenient and enjoyable shopping experience are paramount to the success of our Web site," said Lillian Vernon, CEO, Lillian Vernon Corporation, a leading online and catalogue retailer. "ActiveTune has helped our IT team make important infrastructure enhancements which have resulted in an optimal online shopping experience for our customers and a high return on investment."

By combining expertise, industry-standard tools and proven processes, ActiveTune enables organisations to drive an increased user load to quickly identify and systematically resolve performance problems to eliminate revenue losses due to poor application performance. Mercury Interactive`s comprehensive approach to production tuning focuses on the infrastructure, application and security systems to resolve persistent and intermittent performance problems and provide maximum performance for a wide spectrum of enterprise applications, including CRM, ERP, B2B, B2C, intranet and Internet. In addition, ActiveTune ensures that third-party system components are resilient to load and do not impact overall performance.

There are several reasons why applications that perform well in the testing lab fail to do so in production. First, the testing lab is usually a scaled down version of production that seldom includes production infrastructure components such as firewalls, load balancers and cache severs. Additionally, the Internet and its infrastructure are absent, so elements such as switches, routers, gateways, bandwidth and ISP peering-all of which can impact performance-are not present during testing. Finally, security components such as hardware, software and encryption, often missing from the testing lab, impact the performance of an application in production.

"Production environments are extremely complex and are almost impossible to replicate in a testing lab," said David Gehringer, director of product marketing at Mercury Interactive. "Furthermore, production systems are constantly evolving with new applications, software and hardware updates and ever changing user loads. ActiveTune provides companies with the means to optimise the performance of their applications in this environment to ensure that they are reaping the full benefit of their software and hardware investments."

More information can be found at www.mercuryinteractive.com.