With Christmas marketing campaigns in full swing and US shoppers predicted to spend over $16 billion online during the festive season, businesses need to guarantee their mobile and web applications will perform well under pressure and handle the upcoming onslaught of traffic. In response, Borland, a Micro Focus company, has launched Borland Credits – a new virtual currency that can be used to purchase Silk Performer CloudBurst testing services. The pre-paid model delivers application performance testing without the need for hardware assets, helping users to significantly reduce testing costs and complexity, quickly and efficiently.
 
A testing situation                
According to global research, conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by Borland, 44% of CIOs are aware of the events that drive peak-traffic loads, but do not simulate website performance with heavy load testing to see if they can handle the increased pressure on their websites.  That’s despite knowing that even minor delays to website response times can have a sizable impact on customer satisfaction, page views, conversion rates and site abandonment.
 
Commenting on the challenge, Archie Roboostoff, Borland Solutions Portfolio Director at Micro Focus, said: “With the Christmas holidays just around the corner, businesses need absolute confidence that their high-quality applications will perform well under pressure and handle peak loads.  However, managing and emulating hundreds of thousands of realistic end-users, from multiple regions, in order to load test an application can be time-consuming, complex and costly.  It’s enough to deter many businesses from testing in the first instance.
 
“We’ve created Borland Credits to offer businesses a forward-thinking and flexible way in which to get more from the cloud,” continued Roboostoff. “Users will have easy access to our Silk Performer CloudBurst testing services – from anywhere in the world – without the need for unnecessary, costly infrastructure, which often sits around collecting virtual dust until it is needed.  We’re giving our customers better control over their testing expenditure, with the ability to ensure their applications run at optimum levels, wherever they may be.”
 
Users can choose between several packages, depending on how many Borland Credits are purchased in one go, without being locked into to a specific subscription plan or paying any service fees:
· Cloud infrastructure: Rent unlimited cloud infrastructure by the hour, to execute a load test.
 
Unlimited virtual end-user licenses: Users can pay per virtual end-user within a 24-hour period, depending on the application type under test.
· Spanning test periods: Purchase a 24-hour testing period model, which enables a load test to be tailored, run, analyzed and re-run multiple times without an additional charge.
 
Before any load test is conducted, Silk Performer CloudBurst will display an estimate of how many Borland Credits will be used and on completion of a test, will calculate the number of Borland Credits to debit from the account to help users budget accordingly.
 
Through the new billing model and Borland Credit system users will also be notified by email, 24-hours in advance of when a load test agent is about to automatically close and will receive Virtual User Price Protection, so that if an application doesn’t scale to meet the loadsanticipated, they will only pay for what they have used.
 
Borland Credits can be purchased via the Silk Performer Cloud Portal or a Borland sales representative.
 
For further information on Borland Credits, please visit: www.borland.com/cloudburst.