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Take a minute this month to discover each of our solutions in images:
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1st weekly triple-play benchmark in Spain... compliments of ip-label.newtest
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For the first time a benchmark of triple-play offers from ISPs will be published every week on the website of our press partner, MuyInternet.
This very complete benchmark will also investigate the performance of the websites of corporate-class Spanish businesses: retail, banking/insurance, internet, communications, and more.
To view this week’s results, click here.
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Read the latest analyses
of the Asian web
By Arthur Hamon - Asia Pacific Area Manager,
with Alain Petit - Head of Benchmarks
& Studies
L’Atelier BNP Paribas, teaming up with the performance measurement specialist ip-label.newtest, regularly offers its readers an analysis of the web in Asia. For their latest study, l’Atelier BNP Paribas and ip-label.newtest focused on the performance of Chinese bank websites.
e-Banking : latest study (available only in French)
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Study: how e-retail performs
in the Netherlands
From 28 July to 25 October 2010, ip-label.newtest conducted a study of the performance of the websites of the leading Dutch online retailers of computer and multimedia electronics, in addition to online travel agencies.
This study shows that very significant variations in performance can be observed from one site to the next, regardless of business sector.
Economists tend to agree that even if it is happening more slowly than hoped, the global economic crisis has bottomed out, gradually giving way to an eagerly awaited recovery. Consumer confidence is reviving, and people are more willing to spend on purchases than before.
This economic comeback is welcomed by businesses with a sigh of relief, for it allows hopes of financial results more in line with what they are looking forward to.
While traditional businesses, with physical stores, are getting their displays ready for their traditional local clientele, another category of business – e-commerce - is targeting a potentially much larger clientele.
Unlike physical stores where the consumer sometimes has to travel considerable distances in his choice of transport, which limits how many times he can come to the store, online shoppers can without leaving home visit as many websites as they wish using a simple computer connected to the internet, and this enables them to compare offers, prices and services.
Competition in the world of e-commerce is therefore fiercer, and forces e-retailers to stand out with specific offers, attractive pricing, and irreproachable service.
The e-retailer’s website is perceived by the online visitor as an immense storefront. The quality of the graphics, the ease of finding information, or efficient navigation are major factors which will encourage the visitor to stay or come back to the site. But he must be able to enter the store, move from display to display, and check out. For online stores, that means making access to the website available and providing for rapid display of or at least a reasonable wait for the pages requested.
ip-label.newtest tracked the performance of the main Dutch computer and multimedia electronics e-retailers, as well as online travel agencies for three months, from 28 July to 25 October 2010. The travel sector is in fact represented by 3 distinct services: sale of business tickets for corporate customers, sale of consumer tickets to the general public, and lastly package tours including the travel and the stay. Therefore the websites of 4 business sectors or panels are analyzed in this study.
This study shows that major variations in performance have been observed from one site to the next, whatever the business sector. Furthermore, none of the 32 sites analyzed has succeeded in marshalling all of the technical criteria needed to ensure its visitors optimum conditions for accessing and using its services.
Although none was catastrophic, the rate of successful access to the sites was often insufficient, the pages too slow to load, and with sometimes very considerable variations in performance.
It is vital that the companies which feature in our study become aware that their websites, even if their performance cannot be considered inacceptable, nevertheless have service deficiencies. For 2, 3 or 4 online shoppers in 1000 to be unable to visit the store means having to definitively abandon a not inconsiderable part of annual revenues.
Click here to download the full study.
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ip-label.newtest announces the grand opening of its users club.
Join us on LinkedIn to learn about our latest news and product developments, and to dialogue with our QoE experts.
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In this edition:
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11 resolutions for an outstanding year
 Recently we have made an unprecedented push for innovation which, in 2011, will take the form of the release of new product versions across all of our product lines. For the most part, these will be entirely unique world premiers.
I hereby pledge that the 11 innovations presented in this newsletter will be made available during the year. Most of them are in advanced stages of completion, and there is every chance that additional new developments will join the 11 now in the pipeline.
This is therefore a road map covering not only purely technical aspects but also a number of service- and communications-related issues.
With my very best wishes for continuing success throughout the year during which, I hope, we will take part in many projects together in mutual trust.
We aim to please
and to earn your loyalty.
Our ambition is to keep on surprising you.
Find out now about our Excellence 2011 programme.
Eric Varszegi
CEO
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Cloud Observer 2011
 The Cloud Observer passive measurement service that processes 100% of users was released in 2010. It industrially addresses web sites and web applications. It will be rounded out with the addition of several modules in 2011.
The first of them, in the “services measured” category, will be oriented towards streaming video services. These will have the capability of integrating into the Cloud Observer platform in a variety of formats. Microsoft Windows Media Player will be integrated natively, and other streaming formats will also be available. It will therefore be possible to effectively monitor the transmission quality of communications campaigns as much within the company in a closed group of users as outside, during internet broadcast campaigns. Correlation of the quality of transmission and the duration of stream playing will be native to the tool.
The second module in the “services measured” category relates to the performance of iPhone/iPad applications. A specialized library will be made available for integration into the application in order to facilitate the collection of metrics from usage patterns and will propagate them directly to Cloud Observer collectors. While websites visited by these devices are already natively measured in Cloud Observer, the same was not true of their apps. This module is therefore a significant addition for marketing and technical specialists.
The third module will operate in the “reporting” category, and will relate to the arrangement of data in real time. It will be possible to view the current quality of experience of 100% of users continuously, with a display refresh every 5 minutes. Cloud Observer will thus offer three levels of reporting:
• Real-time access to data – technical monitoring of quality and supervision during major events (year-end holidays, sales, streaming media broadcast campaign, etc.)
• Access to data of the preceding day – tracking of objective daily indicators across multiple dimensions, technical validation, stabilization of past releases, quality tracking by type of navigator, comparison of one day with another, by context, etc.
• Access to consolidated data – tracking of monthly SLAs, capacity planning, trends, communication dashboards, etc.
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 With 10 years behind it, ip-label.newtest’s historic Datametrie product line continues to develop with the expansion and enrichment of its measurement network alongside technological innovations that align it ever more closely with its users’ needs.
As it has every year, the metrology network is expanding through the addition of new points of presence, this time in North Korea (Seoul) and the Czech Republic (Prague), with two or three others now under study. Furthermore, 2011 has started with a fresh network because all POPs were upgraded last year to accommodate Internet Explorer version 8 and additional POPs now include the RIA offer (Rich Internet Application) for operation with the browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox. This confirms once again the representativeness of the measurements supplied by ip-label.newtest, now that Firefox is, since the start of 2011, ahead of Internet Explorer in the European market*.
 Apart from this representativeness, the Datametrie RIA solution will be enriched with new metrics to help teams in charge of internet site monitoring to fine-tune their diagnostics. For example, the tool clearlys identifies, as curves on a graph, how your outside content impacts your response times. It is thus possible to display the performance of a specific object or domain, as well as to separate into different curves the performance of your internal objects, your objects housed on cache servers (CDN), and external objects (analytic tools, Facebook links, Google Maps, or other supplied content). It is then a simple matter to identify the origin of potential deteriorations in your response times and to take appropriate action. Another very pertinent indicator is the measurement of the time to display the first object of your pages: you can thereby know whether a user is satisfied, because his/her page displays quickly (even if full loading of the page is slow), or on the contrary, is frustrated because he/she has to wait several long seconds before being able to view the first element. These developments are already available in the tool on request, during scenario configuration (contact your support or pre-sales representatives to learn more). The enhancements will be gradually integrated transparently into observation reports.
Lastly, the Datametrie extranet will also benefit from new functionalities in terms of the interface and alerting. Yet the main development of the year is the integration of web services modules that will enable customers who wish to do so to automate their retrieval of Datametrie data. This development results from growing demand for product openness to third-party systems that do not have an end-user monitoring component. Eventually it will also be possible to develop additional metrics displays to view indicators in real time (for instance, in a custom supervision display) or control the main parameters of the solution from external tools (stop/start a monitor, edit settings, etc.).
As you can see, in 2011 you will find in Datametrie a monitoring offer with unmatched fineness of analysis especially through our RIA offer which is increasingly open to market solutions and fully harmonized with the other offers in the ip-label.newtest product lines.
* Source Degroupnews : Firefox : premier navigateur européen devant Internet Explorer
(Firefox: the leading browser in Europe, ahead of Internet Explorer)
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Newtest 2.2 and 7.5
The Newtest software suite benefits from a major overhaul in terms of ergonomics and the design of the Newtest Management Console 2.2.0 supervision console. Beyond enhanced design and ergonomics, this new version of Newtest Management Console integrates new functionalities to facilitate use of the solution.
These include: 
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At the measurement level, assistance in setting reference thresholds, improved management of retries, and more
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Possibility of filtering supervision display
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Improved diagnostics: capability of archiving to a disk, setting up a diagnostic video, etc.
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Management of configurations, rollback possible…
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Selection of graph measurement
The new 7.5.0 version of Newtest Robot and Newtest Transaction Builder for Robots offers new functionalities (video, mobility) which expand the range of applications monitored by the Newtest suite.
 Lastly, the new version 7.50 provides new tools for making scenario scripting easier:
- Tool for defining keystrokes (function SendKey)...
- Tool for defining screen coordinates…
- Fonction
for inserting video quality analysis into an existing script.
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Developments in monitoring apps on Android mobile devices...
 The success of apps for iPhone and Android has been observed everywhere. These open up new usage contexts and the stakes are high in terms of revenues, customer loyalty, etc. Terminals like smartphones, and home and/or internet tablets, have become ubiquitous devices for occasional as well as primary online usage. The complexity of these applications and their recourse to numerous third-parties along the mobile information production chain cause sporadic glitches that are difficult to factualize without permanent monitoring. This is why ip-label.newtest is rounding out its offer of monitoring the availability and performance of iPhone/iPad and Windows Mobile applications with a tool for measuring terminals running the Android OS. This solution will be available from June 2011.
 The offer features in the catalogue under the Mobile range, and consists of user-defined single scenarios which the robot replays at a regular frequency via direct control of the tablet or smartphone. Available on a shared probe for small quantities or on the dedicated probe for more voluminous scenarios, the offer will be fully integrated into the Datametrie or Newtest service. Indicators showing service availability and performance by step will be detailed in reporting, as well as the visuals recorded during each navigation in the application. In the event of an error, targeted diagnostics files will be supplied to assist in analyzing the reasons for anomalies. Alerting functions will be available, and will allow operations teams or outside parties to be informed of anomalies.
In this way, companies whose digital strategy encompasses such terminals will find in ip-label.newtest what they need to monitor quality and follow up the SLAs established with outside parties for the mobile channel. These analyses will extend dashboards to cover mobile for e-retail or e-service customers. They will bring a reduction in the downtime of mobile services, thus generating more revenues.
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On the Consulting menu for 2011:
virtualization, high availability, ITIL and IT outsourcing
 If you have been a loyal customer, you already know about our consulting offer for load testing, training, and implementation of Newtest solutions. We have been successfully assisting our customers in these areas for a number of years. To forge ahead and continue to match technical/methodological developments in the IT sector, we wish to add to our offer. Therefore in 2011 we will offer new services in relation to such key topics as high availability, web services, and Newtest and ITIL outsourcing services.
Custom training courses
In 2011, we will offer custom training in Newtest to supplement the existing training courses. The programme includes one-day sessions on virtualization, web services and high availability management. In addition, our training catalogue now features the new product offer, Cloud Observer, in the form of two training courses: Cloud01 to gain familiarity with the offer and perform data analysis; Cloud02 to deepen analysis and design specific data cubes.
A new range of Newtest IT outsourcing offers
Do you lack the necessary technical skills within your company? Do you want to outsource administration of your DWH database, your robots or your NEP servers? Are you looking for a vendor-managed turnkey QoE solution?
In response to these needs and to guarantee optimal operation ip-label.newtest now offers three outsourcing packages distance-managed by a senior consultant: NEP management, Datawarehouse management, and scripts & robots management.
A new expertise offer to better coordinate ITIL and QoE
As discussed in a preceding newsletter, QoE tools make an essential contribution to the ITIL undertakings of our customers. Yet to successfully meld ITIL with QoE, you have to be able to answer a whole series of questions: how do I instrument my QoE approach? What applications should be measured? Where should I set the SLA threshold? Who should receive dashboards? For what action plans?
To assist you, we are now offering our expertise in these organizational topics. Our aim is to help you integrate your QOE approach and our tools into the best fit with your internal processes.
Services for integrating with the latest technologies
Whether by choice or out of necessity, many of our customers are using virtualization technologies or are drawing up BCPs for their critical applications. As a corporate application, Newtest can/must be able to conform to these organizational choices. It stands to reason that we are called on for information, training, or assistance in these areas.
Focus on virtualization
ip-label.newtest solutions operate in virtualized mode: our technical pre-requisites are drawn up on the basis of operating system (Windows) specifications regardless of whether it is virtualized. By adhering to these pre-requisites, many customers are already successfully using virtualized solutions with the Newtest server or with Newtest robots.
ip-label.newtest ensures support for virtualized installations: the conditions for support of virtualized environments are available in the knowledge base provided by the support team.
ip-label.newtest consultants have extensive know-how in the virtualization of Newtest solutions. They regularly carry out installation or tuning in virtualized environments. Capitalizing on their experience, the training team will offer in Q1 2011 a one-day training session on how to virtualize Newtest solutions. This day should provide you with the answers to your questions, including:
• What constraints should be taken account of when virtualizing Newtest?
• How can I check operating performance?
• What is the feedback on virtualizing large-scale configurations (100 robots)?
For more specific requests, our consultants are standing by to help with your virtualization projects. We can assist you from the POC to the rollout and receipt stages. At every step of the way, your project will benefit from our expertise in tandem with your own virtualization experts to provide you with deliverables tailored to your specifications.
To be continued…
Forthcoming newsletters will provide details on high availability and Newtest outsourcing.
Would you like to know more at present? Please contact your account manager for a detailed presentation.
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 Certified ISO 9001-2008 for over 3 years now, ip-label.newtest has at present set itself a further goal to showcase its technical and organizational skills:
At the technical level, we have decided to apply for ISO 17025 accreditation: the purpose of this standard, designed at the outset for testing and calibration laboratories, is to obtain recognition of our competence in measuring the quality of user experience. With this accreditation, exceedingly strict in terms of controls and test protocols, ISO (International Standardization Organization), via COFRAC, will recognize ip-label.newtest as THE reference in the field of auditing user experience.
Our aims include the following:
- through validation of test methods: to set a test protocol that is explicit and transparent to our customers while ensuring control over testing environments
- through measurement traceability: to ensure customers of correct calibration of our measurement instruments, especially through calibration and validation.
- through the quality of tests: to guarantee the consistency and validity of the tests performed.
- through reporting of results: to record explicitly, clearly, and objectively the results of tests, by ensuring their conformity with respect to the method proposed, and especially by systematically appending written opinions and interpretations that are commented orally.
ISO 17025, like the philosopher’s stone that is supposed to transmute base metals into gold, should enable ip-label.newtest to transform itself into a recognized player and a recognized authority through its competence in carrying out tests in digital environments.
At the organizational level, the ISO 20000 standard will enable validation of the results of actions undertaken over the past year to set up ITIL processes (incident management, configuration management, etc.).
Beyond accreditation, the aim is to validate an organization whose main emphasis is on the customer and an approach based on continuous improvement.
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Our support policy first of all sets forth the points of contact between the customer and ip-label.newtest, as well as the means of communication used for each type of incident: web, phone, e-mail. On this occasion we will make available an inbox that will allow you to escalate when necessary.
Two offers will be available:
Hone and certify your Datametrie, Newtest and Cloud Observer skills