News release

HP Brings Affordable Performance Testing to the Cloud

HP today announced HP LoadRunner in the Cloud, a new application performance testing offering designed to help IT organizations easily and affordably optimize their website performance for changing business demands.

HP LoadRunner, the industry’s best-selling load testing software, is now available via Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), making performance testing accessible to businesses of all sizes. This on-demand software gives clients a flexible “pay as you go” approach for performance testing of mission-critical applications and websites.

“The rise of cloud computing has brought the promise of infinite scalability for applications, but it has also brought a new set of challenges for developers and performance testers,” said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm voke inc. “With HP’s LoadRunner in the Cloud, businesses can test, tune, analyze and optimize applications for the cloud, enabling clients to take advantage of cloud economics with flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing.”

Performance testing is an integral part of the application life cycle – which spans development to production – but smaller organizations typically do not have the infrastructure requirements or resources to support it. This can lead to inadequate testing or none at all, which puts organizations at greater risk for website failure and loss of revenue opportunities. Midsize and large businesses experience constant pressure to lower operating costs and gain greater agility in response to increased customer demands.

“Amazon Web Services is pleased to work with HP to provide customers with enterprise application performance testing that is highly scalable, on-demand and pay as you go,” said Terry Wise, director, Business Development, Amazon Web Services. “This new offering gives business of all sizes access to a cloud offering that will ensure applications are built to exceed customer expectations.”

HP LoadRunner in the Cloud allows businesses to:

• Protect the integrity of applications and website performance by making testing more ubiquitous;
• Increase agility for quicker response to unplanned, ad-hoc situations with an on-demand, preinstalled performance testing application; and
• Take advantage of affordable, hourly rates – businesses simply need a credit card to pay on demand.

HP also offers testing services delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS) to help IT organizations further reduce costs and improve business results.

• HP Elastic Test enables IT organizations to take advantage of cloud elasticity to instantly expand testing capacity cost-effectively. Specifically designed for spike load testing, HP Elastic Test provides the ability to scale up to very large loads in a utility-based fashion.
• HP Cloud Assure takes advantage of the speed, flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness of cloud services. Based on 10 years of HP’s SaaS expertise and advanced service-level performance, it delivers four of the attributes analysts believe are key to reliable cloud computing – security, performance, availability and cost control.

“Application performance and customer loyalty go hand in hand,” said Jonathan Rende, vice president and general manager, Business Technology Optimization Applications, Software and Solutions, HP. “HP and Amazon Web Services are helping businesses increase their competitive advantage by ensuring their mission-critical applications and websites perform as expected and are responding to dynamic business needs.”

HP LoadRunner in the Cloud is initially available as a free beta offering in the United States only.⁽¹⁾ More information is available at http://www.hp.com/go/loadrunnercloud.

About HP

HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com/.

⁽¹⁾ The beta program will start with only U.S.-based customers and grant them the operational capability to utilize HP LoadRunner v9.5 AMIs for an hourly price per instance. HP’s license fees for HP LoadRunner in the Cloud are waived for the beta program, but customers are still responsible for payment to Amazon Web Services LLC for Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and bandwidth usage.

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