AUSTIN, TEXAS (09/12/2000) - Tonic Software has snared its first customer: Electronic Data Systems Corp., which this week will announce a multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal to host the Web applications management tool developed by the Austin, Texas, start-up.
EDS' Web Hosting Services will offer Web site performance testing, monitoring and scalability assessment services based on Tonic's software. The services initially are geared toward the 600 Web sites that EDS hosts, but eventually EDS will offer one-time and regular assessments to any Web site.
The EDS deal is a coup for Tonic, a 10-month-old, venture-funded company launched by former executives of IBM's Tivoli Systems group. Tonic introduced its first product in May and is trying to sign up several large companies that have been testing the software since then.
Tonic's software, which runs on a Windows NT server, models the complex ways in which end users interact with a Web site. For example, it can measure the performance an end user will experience at an e-commerce Web site when that person orders products using services such as credit card verification that are hosted on third-party sites.
Web site operators can use Tonic's tool to determine how many concurrent users a site can handle before crashing as well as provide ongoing performance monitoring of the site. Tonic's software also tests whether the Web site is generating and presenting the appropriate information to an end user and whether applications are performing as anticipated.
"In the old days, you had a human buffer between your IT department and your customers. But nowadays, your customers are interacting directly with your organization's IT department over the Web," explains Steve Marcie, chief technology officer at Tonic. "Our technology gives you insight into how your Web applications actually function."
Tonic's software helps IT managers identify Web applications problems before they occur, determine the cause of the problems and correct them. It was these features that attracted EDS, says Gary Lerew, vice president of EDS Web Hosting Services.
"The Tonic tool allows us to go in and see exactly where the bottleneck is at a very granular level," Lerew says. "Where this product adds the most value is where sites are moving to and conducting business on the Internet. It's the e-commerce sites that need to have tools and capabilities" for performance monitoring, he adds.
EDS Web Hosting Services group will introduce Tonic-based services this fall, and EDS Internet Application Development Group has adopted Tonic as part of its toolbox for developing Web applications. EDS sees potential for selling Tonic services to public and private Web sites.
"There's certainly an increasing demand for Web site testing to be done as a hosted service," says Dick Heiman, a research director at Framingham, Mass., market research firm IDC. Heiman says he hasn't seen another application like Tonic's, but several vendors are offering hosted stress- or load-testing services.
"There's great demand for companies to roll out new Web applications faster and faster. And the exposure from these applications is greater than ever...If your application fails, you end up on the front page of The Wall Street Journal," Heiman explains. Corporate IT departments are "looking for help in doing testing."
In late August, Tonic shipped Version 1.6 of its software, which includes a Java-based graphical user interface as well as an HTML interface for remote dial-in. Version 1.7, due in October, will add parsing technology to verify that all the dynamically generated parts of a Web page appear as they should.
Tonic is sold on a monthly fee basis depending on the number of Web servers being monitored. It starts at $650 a month for a single-processor Web server.
Tonic: www.tonicsoftware.com.