PRESS RELEASE
Keynote Acquires Red Alert, Provider of Industry-Leading
Web Monitoring and Alarm Services
Adds 900 New Customers to its Existing Base of 1350
Corporate Customers
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SAN MATEO, California, August 18, 2000 -- Keynote (Nasdaq:KEYN),
The Internet Performance Authority®, today announced the
acquisition of Red Alert, a privately-held company based in
Dallas, Texas with over 1,000 corporate customers that is
a provider of Web site accessibility monitoring for e-businesses
worldwide. The purchase price is $15 million paid in cash,
with additional cash of up to $10 million based upon the successful
achievement of certain performance goals. The acquisition
will be accounted for as a purchase. The acquisition strengthens
Keynote's leadership position with immediate ability to market
and sell its services to Red Alert's corporate customers interested
in measuring, assuring and improving e-commerce quality of
experience (QoE).
Red Alert was recently named by Information Week as one of
the 100 most innovative e-business companies in America, carries
no debt or outside investment. Red Alert's customer base includes
Fortune 1000 companies in all industry sectors such as telecommunications
(Lucent Technologies (NYSE:LU)), finance (Citicorp (NYSE:C),
information technology (IBM (NYSE:IBM)), banking (The Chase
Manhattan Corporation (NYSE:CMB)) and retail (Best Buy Company
(NYSE:BBY)).
The acquisition provides both the Keynote and the Red Alert
customer base, a small percentage of which are existing customers
of both companies, with complementary one-stop, outsourced
solutions to meet all their mission-critical needs related
to Web site performance. Keynote is the leader and trusted
authority in Web site and application performance measurement,
diagnostics and load testing and has built the world's largest
global measurement computer infrastructure for benchmarking
and improving end-user Web site experience. Red Alert is the
leader in accessibility monitoring and sophisticated real-time
alert systems. Both services are critical for superior online
customer service and retention.
"This is a tremendous win/win acquisition from both
a technology and business perspective due to the natural synergies
between our two companies, but an even greater win for our
customers and prospects," said Umang Gupta, Chairman
and CEO of Keynote. "Red Alert's Web site accessibility
monitoring and sophisticated real-time alerts, added to Keynote's
growing line of e-commerce benchmarking, diagnostic and load
testing services, strengthen the range of solutions we provide
to companies concerned about the Quality of Experience (QoE)
for their online customers. They now have unprecedented access
to a family of outsourced solutions for measuring, assuring
and improving the performance of their Web sites from an end
user perspective."
Research shows that 75% of accessibility failures cannot
be detected locally since most of the problems occur across
the network outside the firewall. The newly renamed Keynote
Red Alert "outside in" service constantly monitors
the availability of its customers' mission-critical networks,
Web servers and applications from an end-user perspective.
When Keynote Red Alert detects that a monitored device is
inaccessible, is returning incorrect data or is responding
slowly to connection requests, the service immediately dispatches
error notifications to customers' designated personnel by
email, numeric or alpha-numeric pagers or wireless phones
via text messaging. Red Alert's sophisticated real-time alert
system provides an excellent companion to Keynote's performance
threshold-based alarm capability provided by Keynote's Perspective
measurement service, which notifies companies when a Web site
is taking longer than a specified number of seconds to download
a page or execute a transaction from any one of 50 metropolitan
areas worldwide.
Keynote Red Alert offers a near-zero false alarm rate which
is of great importance to Webmasters, system administrators
and operations personnel tasked with maintaining 100% uptime
of their network operations centers, Web servers, email servers
and other Internet devices. The Keynote Red Alert ‘checking
sequence' is designed to provide foolproof verification of
a monitored device's accessibility to the Internet. Every
error condition is triple-checked, using three fully-independent
Internet connections with no common backbone networks, local
Internet access providers or local network equipment among
them. Keynote Red Alert customers are notified about a problem
after Keynote Red Alert has attempted three different major
backbone paths to their device and found the connection to
be inaccessible or malfunctioning all three times.
"Keynote's unmatched global measurement infrastructure
and offering, combined with our accessibility monitoring,
diagnostic and alerting technologies, presents our customers,
prospects and partners tremendous synergies now and moving
forward. We are extremely excited to join the Keynote team,"
said Michael Martin, general manager of Keynote's Red Alert
division.
"Red Alert has been my availability gospel from day
one of bCentral operations. It's a reliable service with an
easy-to-understand interface at a terrific price. An invaluable
tool for Web sites that consider uptime to be of critical
importance," said William F. Nagle, bCentral Operations
Program Manager, Microsoft Corp.
About Red Alert
Founded in 1995, Red Alert is the leading provider of Web
site accessibility monitoring for e-businesses worldwide.
The company's Red Alert service constantly monitors the availability
of its customers' mission-critical networks, Web servers and
applications from an end-user perspective.
About Keynote
Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority®, is the world's
leading provider of e-commerce performance benchmarking, diagnostic,
load-testing and consulting services. The company markets
Keynote PerspectiveTM, Transaction PerspectiveTM, Consumer
PerspectiveTM and Keynote Red AlertTM, global real-time services
that measure, assure and improve the quality of service of
e-commerce Web sites around the world and KeyReadinessTM,
an accurate and realistic pre- and post- deployment Web-site
load testing service. Keynote currently measures more than
12,500 URLs using its global infrastructure of more than 750
measurement computers connected to the major Internet backbones
from over 120 statistically selected Internet access locations
representing 50 metropolitan areas worldwide. Internet performance
and availability data are collected at Keynote's sophisticated
operations center and are instantly available to customers
through any Web browser.
Keynote customers include over 1,350 leading e-commerce Web
sites and hosting companies including AdForce (Nasdaq:CMGI),
Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM), Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI), Compaq Computer
(NYSE:CPQ), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq:CSCO), Dell Computer (Nasdaq:DELL),
Digital Island (Nasdaq:ISLD), Digex (Nasdaq:DIGX), DoubleClick
(Nasdaq:DCLK), Global Center (Nasdaq:GBLX), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT),
National Semiconductor (NYSE:NSM), SABRE Holdings (NYSE:TSG),
UPS (NYSE: UPS) and WorldCom/UUNET (Nasdaq:WCOM).
Keynote is a member of the internationally known Stanford
University Statistics Department's Industrial Affiliates Program
and works with Stanford statistics experts within the program
to help define its methodology for measuring Web-site performance
and ensure the accuracy of its data.
For further information about Keynote, visit
the Keynote Web site at http://www.keynote.com.
Keynote, Perspective, MyKeynote, Lifeline and The Internet
Performance Authority are trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc.
Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Editorial Contacts:
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote, (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com
Mary Lindsay, Lindsay PR, (408) 984-7242, mary@lindsaypr.com
Sarah O'Connell, Ruder Finn, (212) 583-2724, oconnells@ruderfinn.com
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