HP Enhances Performance Testing Solutions to Help Customers Decrease Costs, Meet Service Levels

NEW YORK, HP today announced major new releases of software and services designed to help IT organizations better manage performance across the entire application life cycle.

HP announced HP Performance Center 9.5, a suite of enterprise-class performance testing software that includes HP LoadRunner, the industry’s best-selling load testing software. HP Performance Center lets customers validate application performance against business requirements during the testing cycle to mitigate the risks associated with application deployment and upgrades when they go live.

HP also updated its Application Lifecycle Management services to help IT organizations create Centers of Excellence (CoE) to increase the quality of applications while reducing IT costs.

HP’s new offerings help IT organizations adopt a business-centric – rather than a development-centric – view of the application life cycle. This approach helps IT organizations focus on business requirements to better meet service expectations.

“There is a strong correlation between application performance and customer satisfaction,” said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm voke inc. “Businesses can increase their competitive advantage by incorporating performance into the entire application life cycle – defining performance requirements up front, testing to eliminate performance defects before applications are released into production, and monitoring performance in production.”

Center of Excellence saves money and improves quality

To improve service performance, many HP Performance Center customers are adopting a CoE model. In a recent study,(1) voke inc. found organizations that moved to a CoE saw many benefits, including increased resource efficiency and enhanced overall quality. Also, the CoEs helped companies share skills across the organization and retain talent.

“Our Central Performance Testing Service team uses HP Performance Center and HP Quality Center software as part of a robust and auditable testing solution,” said Peter J. Pinto, performance test manager, Friends Provident, a U.K.-based financial services company. “This has helped us build collaboration across teams, decrease test administration, reduce cycle times and achieve exceptional service levels, which has clearly benefited the business.”

In addition, independent analyst company Yphise ranked HP Performance Center as the best solution of those evaluated in a recent report.(2) Yphise describes HP Performance Center as ideal for large-scale enterprise deployments, such as implementing an expertise center dedicated to application performance.

Optimize performance while modernizing applications

To meet the changing needs of businesses, IT organizations are adopting new technologies, such as Web 2.0, to provide more robust functionality. In addition, they are using new processes such as agile development to speed delivery times. These new technologies and processes can make it more difficult to identify potential performance problems during application testing.

The new HP Performance Center 9.5 software and HP Application Lifecycle Management services help companies address challenges that may come with new Web 2.0 applications. In addition, these new offerings enable teams across an organization to work together effectively to assure that applications perform and scale to meet business requirements.

HP Performance Center 9.5 software helps customers:

* Consolidate performance testing capabilities in a CoE with features for sharing test assets and new trending capabilities. Trending helps customers see changes in performance between iterations so they can quickly configure the application for optimal performance.
* Find and fix performance issues in Web 2.0 applications with increased support for new technologies and frameworks, including Adobe® Action Message Format (AMF). This helps businesses build rich Internet applications to improve their end-user experience and increase customer satisfaction.
* Reduce testing time between iterations to support agile development processes with the new Protocol Advisor, which reduces test setup time by automatically determining which protocols are used in an application.

The new HP Software Professional Services for Application Lifecycle Management help customers:

* Reduce costs and improve quality to ensure successful CoE design and implementation. This means a faster time to value for their software investment.
* Accelerate the return on their software investment with packaged services aimed at quickly getting customers up and running.

The new HP Software as a Service (SaaS) Project Services for Performance Center help customers:

* Quickly begin using HP Performance Center on demand to support distributed testing teams and gain flexibility to address peak testing periods. Customers can leverage expert consultants from HP to address large-scale projects such as load testing for ERP/CRM deployments.
* Evolve their CoE practices with a dedicated HP resource to provide ongoing mentoring. This helps customers build their CoE from planning, execution and reporting through implementation.

“The current wave of application modernization seeks to increase agility and lower costs through the adoption of new technologies and processes,” said Jonathan Rende, vice president and general manager, Business Technology Optimization Applications, Software and Solutions, HP. “HP helps IT organizations succeed in these efforts and deliver applications that do exactly what the business needs.”

HP Performance Center 9.5 is available now as a licensed software product and through HP Software as a Service. With HP SaaS, customers can quickly and cost-effectively set up a comprehensive quality management program to validate application functionality, performance and security.

In addition, Testing and Quality Assurance Services provided by EDS, an HP company, deliver managed performance testing and performance modeling services from a global network of testing centers to ensure business systems and applications perform to meet business expectations.

About HP

HP, the world’s largest technology company, simplifies the technology experience for consumers and businesses with a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

(1) voke inc., “Market Snapshot Report: Performance Center of Excellence,” February 2009.
(2) Yphise, “Selected Business Case, PTF – Performance Testing Factory: For guaranteeing the service level of operational services and applications,” November 2008.