HP upgrades performance testing solution 12 March, 2009 By Paul Weinberg

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The company's new Performance Center 9.5 assists customers in the automatic testing and performance monitoring of applications in the development, testing and production phases.

The new suite of enterprise-class performance testing software includes HP LoadRunner, a load testing application that came to HP with its acquisition of developer Mercury Software two years ago.

A customer centric approach is at the core of the Performance Center's view of the development, maintenance and upgrading of an application, which is typically accessed via the Internet by the public for transactions or content, stated Howard Kiewe, senior research analyst at Info Tech Research Group.

He noted that web applications which facilitate data transfer and collaboration across continents inside a global organization might also be a good fit for the new HP software product.

Kiewe predicted that sales for Performance Center will increase as it becomes impractical for developers to manually test and monitor applications involving thousands of users and computers.

"When you are testing your application you want to test that it works, and then you want to test if it works fast enough."

As applications become more multi-tiered, the challenge of figuring out where a breakdown inside the software or web site has occurred increases, stated Mark Sarbiewski, senior director of product at HP Software and Solutions.

"It is really part of a bigger narrative and a bigger play that HP Software is making. And that is really to help our customers, enterprises, large and midsized, put the right quality performance and security around their whole application set, anytime you go and interact with anybody," stated Sarbiewski.

The new version of Performance Center is designed to handle new techniques such as agile development which is designed to speed up application delivery time. However, agile also makes more difficult the process of tracking down performance problems during the testing of an application, stated Subbu Iyer, who is also a senior director of products, HP Software and Solutions.

"More web sites have video streaming, or data streaming inside the application. Agile methodologies put a lot of pressure on the testing organization to support these agile intuitive developments. You are building new versions of the applications on a daily basis and they need to be tested out overnight, or within a day."

Included in Performance Center is the protocol advisor tool which helps the testing person figure out what is embedded inside an application.

"I can run the application through the protocol advisor to quickly find out, okay, these are the sets of technologies that are being used within the application before I can start the testing. This is a much more efficient process," Iyer told eChannelLine.