SUNNYVALE, CALIF. - Application testing tools developer Mercury Interactive will introduce this week at Streaming Media West in San Jose a new line of products and services designed to test streaming media applications.
Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner product and ActiveTest service now have the ability to test streaming media applications before they are deployed. The company's Topaz and ActiveWatch monitoring services will have similar capabilities within the next 45 days, says Simon Berman, director of product marketing at Mercury Interactive.
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Mercury's new product and service are designed to test the end user experience, not just a metric of how long it takes for a file to download. "In the world of streaming, you can't just measure response time of a transaction, it's more the end user's quality of stream," Berman says.
To measure performance, the company takes into account the amount of time it takes for the first frame to be delivered, how much rebuffering occurs and the overall quality of the signal. To accomplish this, test directors can write scripts for LoadRunner that mimic thousands of users hitting the system. As the load is being tested, Mercury measures the client-side metrics to gather performance information. The entire testing process can be directed from a central console, Berman says.
On the service side, Mercury Interactive's Topaz and ActiveWatch products use replay scripts deployed in multiple locations to test user experience. These agents can be deployed in different parts of an organization or geographic region.
Currently, Mercury can test RealNetworks and Microsoft media formats. LoadRunner runs on Windows NT with Linux support planned for some time next year. The streaming add-in for LoadRunner starts at $20,000 for 50 virtual users. ActiveTest for Streaming starts at $15,000 for 100 virtual users. Both Topaz and ActiveWatch are available on a subscription basis; Topaz starts at $2,495 per month for up to five transactions and ActiveWatch starts at $3,750 per month for the same number of transactions.
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