Mercury Interactive Corporation today announced that Opodo is optimising the quality and performance of its online travel service using Mercury Quality Center(tm) and Mercury Performance Center(tm). Opodo needed to ensure it could enhance the satisfaction of customers booking travel and organising trips online ahead of its busiest summer holiday period rather than lose business to rivals in what is an intensively competitive market. Opodo used Mercury’s application delivery offerings to automate the analysis of both Opodo’s live Web site and parallel test environment. The resulting intelligence enabled Opodo to quickly identify areas of its site that are not performing and isolate links and searches that may have been impacted by content changes.

Working with Mercury also enabled Opodo to lower operating costs significantly by bringing application testing in-house, compressing development time to speed the delivery of new content and features, and introducing load testing to determine where the composition of content could be improved to enhance download efficiency.

“Mercury’s application delivery expertise has increased our understanding of site performance and reduced overhead, which has sharpened the experience we can provide to our customers,” said Stuart Walters, Information Technology director at Opodo. “The improvements we have engineered with Mercury are fundamental to delivering our customer service. We are now running a complex pan-European travel portal with an extremely high degree of efficiency.”

Opodo tests every new element of its online presence thoroughly before it goes live. Prior to working with Mercury, that process was done manually and was extremely inefficient. The new, automated process means that changes and additions can be made to Opodo.com much faster, with added confidence that the desired functionality will go live successfully and remain available for customers.

The application delivery offering built using Mercury Quality Center(tm) and Mercury Performance Center(tm) has enabled a fundamental change in the way that Opodo plans its marketing promotions, which are a crucial element of its business development strategy.

When planning special offers that will increase traffic to the site, Opodo now simulates customer access at varying speeds and identifies where performance changes may be needed.

“The ability to reduce both the time and cost of development cycles is critical to a business like Opodo that must respond like lightning to achieve competitive advantage,” said David Harrison, UK managing director of Mercury. “Mercury’s application delivery offerings deliver the high level of automation required to enable these business changes to be implemented with complete confidence that quality and performance will be optimized to deliver greater business value.”

Mercury Quality Center provides automated software testing and quality assurance across a wide range of IT and application environments. It includes an integrated suite of role-based applications and best-practices as well as an open, scalable, and extensible foundation - all designed to optimize and automate key quality activities, including test management, requirements and defects tracking; functional testing and regression testing; and business-process design testing.

Mercury Performance Center optimizes application performance, helping ensure applications will scale to support the right number of users, transaction volumes, and performance levels. Mercury Performance Center includes integrated applications and a business dashboard for key performance optimization activities, including load-testing, performance tuning, capacity planning, and J2EE diagnostics across complex, heterogeneous computing environments.
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