Thinking Inside the Box: SOASTA(TM) Introduces sBox(TM), the Industry's First Complete, Professional, and Affordable Load Testing Appliance

September 17, 2007; 08:29 AM
SOASTA, a leading provider of test automation solutions for Web applications and services, today announced the SOASTA sBox(TM) Load Testing Appliance (sBox). The sBox Load Testing Appliance combines the SOASTA Concerto(TM) Web testing application with a dedicated hardware platform to provide organizations of all sizes worldwide with a distributed, turnkey solution to load test every layer of a Web application. Targeted specifically to the Fortune 100,000, where the performance and scalability of Web applications is an imperative, the sBox Load Testing Appliance ensures Web applications perform the functions that they were designed for in a high quality, reliable manner.

"Small to mid-market, Web-oriented companies are large enough to need professional load testing capabilities, but their budgets can leave them challenged to obtain the necessary solutions," said Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA. "SOASTA has addressed this problem by providing a comprehensive, integrated hardware and software solution at a price point sensitive to mid-market companies."

One of the biggest challenges Fortune 100,000 companies face today is that they are unable to afford the necessary tools to thoroughly load test their Web applications. With the proliferation of self-service Web applications, where companies rely on Web to provide the customer experience, high-quality performance is not just an expectation it's a requirement. Too often these companies are left with only time-intensive and costly options -- they can either pay for a costly enterprise-level software solution, negating any cost savings they were hoping to achieve, or spend even more time and money cobbling together disparate open source products. To address this growing problem, the new sBox Load Testing Appliance provides the completeness of a Fortune 1000 solution at an affordable price.

sBox Load Testing Appliance features include:
* Dedicated Testing Environment: a complete and affordable
hardware/software appliance that includes everything testers need to build and execute a professional quality load test. The sBox features leading edge capabilities for test recording and creation, scalable and distributed test execution, and an advanced analytics dashboard.
* Distributed Web Services Architecture: sBox leverages the best of today's leading edge technology -- from a Web services core to an Ajax UI to support the load testing of any Web application -- from the message layer to the Web service to browser actions. The sBox can be installed on different physical servers to maximize scale and performance. This architectural flexibility allows the SOASTA Concerto application to be run in many hardware configurations starting from a single all-in-one server node all the way to a very complex large global test network capable of running a test simultaneously from many server nodes distributed around the world.
* Easy Creation of Virtual Users: automatically convert usage scenario recordings into test scenarios with the click of a button. Test scenarios can then be easily and visually replicated to create thousands of virtual users, seamlessly allowing for high volume load testing.
* Reusable Test Clips: the building block of testing with the sBox is the Test Clip -- a visual script that is composed of a series of timed or sequenced events (i.e. an http message, a SOAP message, or a UI action). Once built and debugged, test clips can be reused for any type of testing -- functional testing, load testing, performance testing and Web UI testing where appropriate. This very powerful feature substantially improves the productivity of a testing team.
* Unique Visual Design: a groundbreaking visual testing environment is based upon familiar, easy-to-use digital media creation tools. With an immersive, drag and drop interface, testers can easily create and run complex load tests within minutes, find and fix errors in real-time, and collaborate and reuse test scenarios across the testing team.
* Analytic Dashboard: a memory-based analytic service (with persistence to disk) easily handles very large result sets and analytics from the most complex distributed load tests with superior performance. The Analytic Dashboard automatically correlates many data streams from a distributed load test into a single test result on a synchronized timeline, providing the ability to drill down all the way to a single event or message to find the problem.

Pricing and Availability
The new sBox Load Testing Appliance is available now. Pricing for sBox starts at $2,000 per month for 2,000 virtual users. For more information, please contact SOASTA at 866-344-8766 or via email to [email protected].

About SOASTA
SOASTA, Inc. (pronounced so'-sta), is a leading provider of test automation solutions for Web applications and services. SOASTA's mission is to ensure that today's complex Web applications perform in a high quality, scalable, and predictable manner. SOASTA's product family -- including SOASTA Concerto(TM), a uniquely visual Web testing service, and sBox(TM), the industry's first complete, professional, and affordable load testing appliance -- enables faster, more flexible and reliable Web testing for the entire testing team. The company supports Load, Functional, Performance, and Web UI testing. SOASTA is privately held and headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about SOASTA and its product offerings, please visit http://www.soasta.com.
(C)SOASTA, Inc. 2007. SOASTA, SOASTA Concerto, and SOASTA sBox are trademarks of SOASTA, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.