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| 7:18pm EDT, Thu Sep 2 |
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Keynote Helps Companies Manage Mobile Delivery
By:
The Online Reporter
Publish Date: October 19, 2007
Complete articles are posted three weeks after they have been sent to subscribers. To request a copy of the current edition, e-mail paperboy@riderresearch.com .
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Since the mid-1990s Keynote Systems has been providing monitoring,
testing and analysis services to companies that depend on the
Internet. A dozen years ago that was enough - the Internet as a
business-critical tool was still a fairly new concept. Today,
however, the same can be said for mobile phones. Content providers
who don't deliver their wares to mobile users are being left out in
the cold. But, there are dozens of different networks and hundreds
and hundreds of handset models to contend with.
Keynote recently came out with new services dedicated to helping its
current and future customers contend with the confusing mass of user
interfaces, network types, operating systems and business models.
According to Anshu Agarwal, Keynote's executive director of
marketing, the company's Mobile Application Perspective and Mobile
Device Perspective services enable its clients to measure how their
content, such as mobile Web sites, instant messages, e-mail and
purchase transactions, is delivered over a carrier's network. The
Keynote platform runs transactions and collects the data that enable
the customer to determine such things as quality, reliability, usage
and response time.
As for why it believes the market needs this type of service,
Keynote said that, "The mobile experience is unreliable due to
multiple layers of complexity. Smaller players do not have the
resources to ensure the end-user experience."
Both the Mobile Application Perspective (MAP) and Mobile Device
Perspective (MDP) services include various test and analysis
scenarios.
MAP: Thousands of Emulation Scenarios
The Mobile Application Perspective uses handset emulation, allowing
customers to choose from more than 1,000 device profiles, according
to Keynote senior director of mobile technology Manny Gonzalez. MAP
tests WAP content in real-time by allowing users to navigate through
mobile Web pages on the emulated devices to determine if the page is
compatible with various handsets on different carrier networks.
The testing functions include record and playback, which records a
log of a performed sequence so it can be reproduced. This is
particularly important for checking such things as commerce
transactions or if changes to a WAP page cause it to take twice as
long to load.
Customers can also monitor how their mobile applications, content
and services perform over different carrier networks and receive
alerts when problems occur, such as performance falling below
desired a service level threshold.
MAP monitoring can track each and every aspect of a mobile
transaction in real-time. One usage example, provided by Gonzalez,
is an end user who purchases mobile content over the fixed Internet,
has the Web site send an SMS message to his phone and clicks on the
link in the message to download the content over the wireless
carrier's network. The most important factor to Keynote's customers,
he said, is if the entire transaction succeeded. If it didn't, the
service can tell the customer what specific piece failed or took too
much time.
Unlike MAP, which uses emulation that allows customers to test "what
if" scenarios for virtually any WAP site on any handset over any
carrier network, the Mobile Device Perspective (MDP) service uses
physical handsets connected to a live network, so it's limited to
testing and monitoring applications that work on the available
handset models.
According to the company, MAP is typically used to test and validate
any WAP site that users would access through their mobile browsers.
It provides detailed data such as download times, source code and
compatibility results for the emulated devices. MDP, on the other
hand, is generally used to test and validate applications that need
to be run on a physical device, such as those that require a client
download, such as music stores, weather applications or chat
clients. MDP tests the performance and availability of these
applications.
MDP: The Hands-on Approach
Keynote started MDP off with some 25 devices and intends to grow the
number of available models. The folks doing the testing and
monitoring don't have to navigate through the device's keypad,
however; the customer controls a remote handset over the Web via a
PC keyboard.
With MDP, Keynote customers can create automated scripts to test an
application on a number of different handsets and multiple carrier
networks, download content play it on an actual handset to check for
quality and use the record & playback feature to duplicate a
specific segment of a procedure.
Monitoring functions include the ability to track response time,
content rendering and the quality of video streams. The Mobile
Device Perspective on-device monitoring tracks and reports on
problem areas. It also provides in-depth metrics on such data points
as availability, latency, errors and geographic handset location.
To make life easier for customers, MDP gives them a single portal
where they can view a high-level "dashboard view" of how the content
and services perform plus detailed analysis and reports of specific
measurements. Customers can take the data and create custom reports
to track performance over hours, days, weeks or even months.
Both MAP and MDP are available as dedicated agents at $5,000 a month
for unlimited use with four MAP interfaces or four MDP devices.
They're also available as on-demand services over Keynote's public
infrastructure at $500 a month for a single transaction on a single
device.
Additionally, the company intends to launch the Keynote Mobile
Performance Index, which will measure the performance and
availability of 20 popular WAP sites from 50 carriers worldwide. |
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