Recreational Equipment Chooses Keynote to Ensure Lightning Fast Web Site Performance
Editorial Contact:
Della Lowe
Keynote Systems, Inc.
(650) 403-3233
dlowe@keynote.com
REI Gets Site Management from Page Design to Network Level Performance
San Mateo, California, March 3, 2003 - For Recreational Equipment Incorporated (REI), a national retailer of quality outdoor gear and apparel, high Web site performance is vital to its e-business success. REI.com, a pioneer in e-business, uses Web performance management services from Keynote Systems, Inc (Nasdaq: KEYN) to ensure performance and availability and attributes to Keynote the consistently blazing site speed it maintains. “Site performance and stability are critical for successful e-business on REI.com,” said Rod Ketchum, systems architect, Recreational Equipment Incorporated. “Keynote’s services are strategically critical in helping us meet this goal.”
“REI`s mission is to provide high quality goods and exceptional service. Our Web presence is an important part of our business and it is critical that our Web site perform at optimal levels. That makes Keynote a daily necessity,” said Ketchum.
REI.com sets performance goals for the site: one second for the home page, three seconds on other pages and 100 percent uptime. “REI sets the standard in Web performance and Keynote helps us provide our visitors with a superior customer experience which is a priority. As a long-time supporter and customer of Keynote, we believe that the diagnostic and operational enhancements Keynote continues to add to its benchmarking services are a quantum leap in our ability to isolate problems and address them quickly.”
REI.com equates site performance and stability with successful e-business, and directly attributes a great deal of the recognition it has achieved over the past six years as a very successful e-business to its use of Keynote services. Keynote services are used throughout the IS department at REI.com, from QA to production to creative and design, to design and verify the performance of new content and monitor the existing site. And, as further testament to the critical nature of Keynote’s services, Keynote results serve as the basis of service-level verification for REI.com’s relationships with ISPs and other providers.
The Challenge: Gain Control and Ensure Customer Satisfaction
“If your site isn’t up, you’re not doing business,” observes Ketchum. “Therefore, it is strategically necessary for us to know what our customers are experiencing online, 24 hours a day all over the U.S. Once our site content leaves the building and the ISP, it’s out of our hands. Internet performance still is not perfect, and if you don’t know how long your site is taking to load, or how long a transaction is taking, you have a real bottom line problem.”
Ketchum continues, “Monitoring a complete purchase is hard to do, especially outside of REI. Keynote gives us the insight we need into our customers’ experience - from the outside in and helps to ensure the satisfaction of our customers, upon which our business depends.”
The Solution: Site Management, from Page Design to Network-Level Performance
REI.com’s quality assurance (QA), production and creative teams all use Keynote’s benchmarking services: both the Web Site Perspective® full-page service, and Transaction Perspective to measure how long it takes to complete a transaction -- REI’s only way to know if a transaction is failing, according to Ketchum.
“Site management is difficult when a large group of people is adding content, but Keynote helps us tremendously with this,” said Ketchum. QA uses Keynote to verify that new pages and content changes meet the performance baselines they’ve set before being posted. Once content goes live, production continues to monitor site performance and availability. And, the creative designer uses Transaction Perspective to check performance while designing a new page, among other things being able to monitor how speed is affected by using particular HTML or JavaScript code. “Keynote’s instant diagnostic capabilities let us design good web pages and help us make sure that they load quickly before they go live,” said Ketchum.
Keynote Web site Perspective and Transaction Perspective benchmarking services are part of Keynote`s overall Total Performance Management approach to providing end-to-end performance management solutions. Keynote brings to benchmarking its proven expertise in Web performance, based on its 80 percent market share in benchmarking and over five years` leadership in this market.
Keynote Systems, Inc.
Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the global leader in Internet performance management and testing services that improve the quality of e-business. Keynote’s services enable corporate enterprises to benchmark, diagnose, test and manage their e-business systems both inside and outside the firewall. More than 2,300 corporate IT departments and 16,000 individual subscribers rely on the company`s easy-to-use and cost-effective services to optimize revenues and reduce downtime costs without requiring additional complex and costly software implementations.
Keynote Systems, Inc. was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The company can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
© 2003 Keynote Systems, Inc. Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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