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August - 2013 - issue > Cover Story
Keynote Continuously Improving the Worldwide Mobile and Web Experience
Rachita Sharma
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
The mobile and web testing and monitoring market is becoming more complex by the day. Due to the interplay between many variables in a diverse ecosystem including multiple operating systems, browsers, backbones and network providers; backend vendors, access devices and e-commerce and content providers; developing and ensuring a seamless and optimal user experience has become an uphill battle. Imagine someone in Bangalore developing an application for global deployment but needing to test it on multiple American and European networks with handsets available only in those local markets. The logistics and level of complexity involved in the process are mind boggling. Testing a mobile website or application inside a centralized physical lab becomes more difficult since buying and maintaining the latest versions of all the devices and handsets can be a daunting, if not impossible and cost-prohibitive task, especially with the various touch points involved.


But all this is being simplified by innovative solutions from Keynote (NASDAQ: KEYN), the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud testing and monitoring. The company, under the experienced leadership of Umang Gupta, Chairman and CEO, provides companies with solutions for continuously improving the online and mobile experience. By providing a geographically distributed "testing and monitoring lab in the cloud," the San Mateo, California-based Keynote helps companies know precisely how their websites, content and applications perform on actual browsers, networks and mobile devices across the globe.


With fiscal year 2012 revenues of approximately $125 million, Keynote maintains the world's largest cloud based performance monitoring and quality testing infrastructure in the world, comprised of over 7,000 measurement computers and mobile devices in over 275 global locations that enable companies to continuously improve the online and mobile experience.

The Journey to Market Domination

Keynote was founded in 1995 with an initial mission of monitoring the health of the Internet. It provides monitoring services using a SaaS-based business model and interestingly was one of the first companies to provide such an innovative 'on demand' business model at the time. It was definitely ahead of its time; prescient in fact. The company saw spectacular success during the days of the Internet bubble, but was struck by the dotcom bust of 2000, which led to the demise of many Internet startups. Although the company remained above water due to its healthy cash reserves, and a list of over 2,000 corporate clients, revenues began to decline and losses multiplied. At a time when others may have retreated, Gupta decided to invest in the future through a series of new product development projects and multiple strategic acquisitions. The company evolved its Internet offerings from just providing simple Web page measurements to measuring the speed and reliability of comprehensive e-commerce and online financial services business processes, including complete website transactions including buying a book, making a travel reservation or doing online banking. It also extended its services from post-deployment performance monitoring to pre-deployment website load testing. The company became profitable by 2004, but it was not until 2006 that it made its first major acquisition when it bought SIGOS, a German mobile testing company (since renamed Keynote SIGOS). This enabled Keynote to expand its Internet monitoring and testing customer base to include large global mobile operators such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Verizon and many other leading telco providers across the world as Keynote customers. "With the SIGOS acquisition, we extended our performance measurement business from the Internet to mobile, and from the enterprise space to the huge telco space," explains Gupta with a smile.


With the advent of smartphones a few years later, Gupta, a visionary in every sense of the word, then realized that an opportunity existed for an enterprise-class mobile testing platform that allowed mobile applications and website to be tested from the cloud. For years, mobile application developers performed quality assurance on their phones for multiple geographical locations by finding local testers to perform tests for them via devices based in each market. Or companies used handset vendor-supplied emulation software that emulated the devices to be tested," explains Vik Chaudhary, Vice President of Product Management and Corporate Development at Keynote.


However, these technologies did not always provide the most accurate results, or involved a process that was tedious and impractical when applied to diverse devices. With the advent of smartphones, the need of the hour was a global mobile testing platform that could enable mobile app developers to quickly and easily perform QA tests remotely from their desktop, while hooked up to a variety of remote mobile devices at various geographical locations in the cloud.


In 2011 the company purchased an innovative startup company called Mobile Complete and integrated its DeviceAnywhere platform into the Keynote portfolio. DeviceAnywhere is a cloud-based solution for easily and cost effectively testing and monitoring the functionality, usability, performance and availability of mobile applications and websites. The main users of the product are individual mobile application or website developers and enterprises with large mobile QA teams who have a need to perform tests across a myriad of devices and/or cellular networks. The purchase of Mobile Complete was another turning point in Keynote's journey and today Keynote runs three major businesses in the cloud.


Apart from the DeviceAnywhere platform, Keynote also provides two other platforms namely Keynote Perspective, a platform for on-demand real user and synthetic performance measurement and monitoring for enterprise Web and mobile sites including online portals, e-commerce sites and B2B sites; and Keynote SIGOS, a platform which offers active end to end Quality of Service (QoS) testing and monitoring for large telco providers around the world.


Today, Keynote's cloud-based website measurement, monitoring and load testing business accounts for about half of Keynote revenues while the other half consists of providing active end-to-end quality of service testing and monitoring for mobile operators, and mobile testing for developers and QA teams.

The Keynote Advantage

As the world of technology and business continues its dramatic realignment brought about by the 'smartphone revolution,' consumer computing has gained heavy momentum. The onus for the success of any consumer or employee-facing application or Web service lies with the user experience it provides. Companies that deliver a consistently pleasing and trouble-free online experience will become the leaders in this new cloud-based economy. "At Keynote, we recognized that ensuring the best possible user experience is critically important to any successful business," says Gupta.


With its global cloud-based test and measurement infrastructure for Internet and mobile websites, enterprises and telcos, Keynote is able to provide its customers with neutral, unbiased and mission critical data required to mitigate performance issues and optimize the user experience. Keynote takes all the variables into account and provides the most accurate and authentic real time portrayal of the end user experience.


Due to the seamless and 'one of a kind' services provided by the company Keynote has won over an enviable client roster which reads as a 'who's who' of some of the largest companies in the world. Keynote currently caters to more than 3,000 customers including many large E-Commerce players, financial service providers, technology companies, gaming companies and mobile operators. "Any company that provides digital online services on the Internet or on mobile platforms will find our products indispensable," says Gupta.

How Customers Benefit from Keynote

Customers reap many business and technical benefits from Keynote. For example, BBVA Compass, one of the 25 largest banks in the U.S., developed many test cases using the Test Case Manager tool within DeviceAnywhere allowing team members to capture results for review. The test cases allowed them to examine critical functionality on a broad variety of mobile devices on different operating systems such as checking account balances, looking up transaction histories, paying bills and transferring funds between accounts. BBVA developers also performed ad hoc testing by going through varying sequences of opening windows and tasks to identify the source of errors that occur on one version of a device but not another. BBVA has stated publicly that their customer satisfaction scores improved steadily since using Keynote DeviceAnywhere because they now have a much greater understanding for what their customers see and can quickly diagnose and address problems. BBVA has also said they are getting significantly higher ratings for their mobile apps made available through app stores.


Starwood Hotels & Resorts also uses the Keynote DeviceAnywhere platform to test the compliance of dozens of mobile apps and websites created for all of Starwood's groups and properties, including Westin, Le Méridien, Sheraton and others, with corporate branding standards. These mobile apps and websites enable customers to find hotels, learn about services, view pictures of properties and rooms, book reservations and more. The company's global online compliance team has benefitted from the ability to simply go to the Internet, use any mobile device to access any mobile website or device-specific mobile app and review content and functionality.


Starwood has stated publicly that they chose Keynote because it allowed them to do exactly what they needed without the need to rent or purchase devices. They said they can go online and choose from any number of real smartphone devices and OSs available via the Internet and begin testing immediately.


Over a one month period, Starwood testers were able to perform manual testing of their mobile apps and websites using the world's largest real device, cloud testing library - DeviceAnywhere. Testers were able to remotely interact and control every aspect of the mobile device including pressing handset buttons, viewing LCD displays, listening to ringers and tones, playing videos, tapping and swiping touch screens, muting, powering on/off, downloading apps, sending/receiving messages and anything else they could do if they held the physical device in their own hands.


A third example of Keynote's flagship website measurement and monitoring service is that of 21st Century Insurance which uses Keynote Transaction Perspective and Keynote Performance Insights to ensure that customers nationwide receive uniformly high performance and availability from the 21st.com customer-facing website.


21st Century has stated publicly that they had the unexpected benefit of being able to understand the latency of third-party content on their site. They say that now if there's a problem they can identify it quickly, inform the vendors, and remove their tag from the 21st Century site until they get the problem fixed.


21st Century uses KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment) to develop test scripts and Transaction Perspective to simulate key business transactions at regular intervals from multiple geographic locations nationwide to monitor availability and performance on an ongoing basis. Keynote Performance Insights helps the company update their test measurements, interpret performance trends and optimize the site based on ongoing test data.

Combining Innovation and Professionalism

"Our business is built on a culture that combines innovation and professionalism. We are constantly at the cutting edge of the latest trends in the Internet and mobile space. We have a rich understanding of technology and we utilize it to build the tools that our customers require," explains Gupta matter of factly. The company also constantly experiments and works closely with its blue chip customer base to increase the return on their online and mobile channels for doing business. "Ultimately we are a software as a service (SaaS)-based company. Even though we make and sell complex technology, our goal is to make our cloud-based solutions cost effective and hassle-free for all our customers," he adds.


The company has always kept itself ahead of technology curves by sensing and adapting to change even before it happens. It is this foresight that has kept Keynote a largely successful and profitable company to date. Gupta intends to double revenue in the years to come. Keeping his vision set on leveraging the mobile revolution, he envisions dominating the cloud-based mobile testing and monitoring space. Based on the many successes of the company thus far, that doesn't look like a distant dream.

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