Impact Highlights
Meet Service Level Agreements to deliver promised response times to customers of its media publishing system, an online application.
Determine trends to proactively ensure a high degree of online performance in the long term

“As a business-to-business company, we enable a large number of well-known media companies to manage and publish their broadband video over a variety of Internet channels to reach their audience. Keynote Application Perspective® allows us to protect our overall service level agreements to our customers and ensure that we’re delivering the promised Web site response times.”

--Rob Sherrard, Data Center Operations Manager

Company
thePlatform™, a subsidiary of Comcast, is the leading broadband video ASP for content providers, broadband media sites, and mobile businesses. thePlatform currently manages and publishes online and mobile video on behalf of some of the most well known consumer brands, including: Alliance Atlantis, BBC, CNBC, CBS’s College Sports TV, Court TV, Comcast, Hearst, Helio, Hulu, PRIMEDIA, Sony/BMG Music, Ruckus, Telstra, Verizon Wireless, Vongo and others.

Challenge: Track Performance from a Customer Perspective
thePlatform is an application service provider that offers Web-based media management and publishing tools that enable media and content providers to translate a single stream of content into different formats that can be delivered through different channels. It also performs digital rights management. By using thePlatform, media companies can easily create their own video sites as well as syndicate video to leading broadband and mobile destinations such as AOL, Apple iTunes Podcaster, AT&T, MSN, Sprint TV, Verizon Wireless, Yahoo, YouTube, and many others.

While thePlatform leverages content delivery networks such as VitalStream or Akamai to actually stream the video content, it is a vital component of the solution that media companies deliver to their own customers. As such, its Web-based services must furnish a high level of performance.

However, while thePlatform had the capability to test performance of its internal network, it was unable to gain a perspective on performance as the customer would experience it over the Internet. Performance on one part of the Internet could differ from that on another. Said Rob Sherrard, data center operations manager for thePlatform, “We wanted to be able to gain a complete, real-time view of our site’s performance as experienced by customers throughout the United States—as well as worldwide—so that we could quickly address any performance issues before they impacted customers. We also wanted to determine performance trends so that we could proactively address possible future performance bottlenecks; for example, by adding hardware.”

The Solution: Keynote Application Perspective®
thePlatform implemented the Keynote Application Perspective solution, which measures Web site performance from an end user’s perspective from 25 different geographic locations across the United States, and is currently in the process of leveraging Keynote’s monitoring locations around the world as well. Said Sherrard, “After considering several solutions, we selected Keynote because it not only offered the services we needed immediately, but also offered services that would allow us to grow in the future. These included great streaming and mobile platforms, which we hope to use as we continue to deliver more media to mobile handsets.”

Should Keynote Application Perspective uncover a Web site performance problem, the team at thePlatform uses it to quickly troubleshoot the source of the problem, determining whether the issue comes from its own network or from one of its partners.

Results
By using the Keynote Application Perspective solution, thePlatform has been able to ensure that it meets the performance standards its media company customers demand when serving their own customers. If the company does uncover a performance issue, Keynote Application Performance Perspective allows it to pinpoint the source so that any issues can be resolved quickly. Said Sherrard, “As a business-to-business company, we enable a large number of well-known media companies to publish content over a variety of channels to their demanding customers. Keynote Application Perspective allows us to protect our overall service level agreements to our customers and ensure that we’re delivering the promised response times.”

To ensure that it continues to provide high levels of Web site performance, thePlatform is also using Keynote Application Perspective for long-term planning. Said Sherrard, “By leveraging Keynote’s measurement computers around the world, we can plan and determine whether it makes sense for us to add hardware in other market locations, particularly overseas.”

In summary, said Sherrard, “Keynote ensures that we deliver the superior quality that all of our customers require—and its broad range of services ensures that it will grow with us as we continue to expand our services.”

For more information please contact Mariana Kosturos, Citigate Cunningham, (415) 618-8786, mkosturos@citigatecunningham.com