Hotwire.com Selects Shunra Software to Proactively Ensure the Performance of its eCommerce Applications Over the Internet

November 11, 2004 - (PromotionWorld) -  Shunra Software has announced that discount travel site Hotwire.com has selected the Shunra Virtual Enterprise solution to ensure its online travel applications will perform optimally under any remote end-user Internet condition, before they are deployed in production.

"Before using the Shunra Virtual Enterprise we had to make educated guesses. With the Shunra Virtual Enterprise we now know in advance that our application changes are ready for customers and can move them into production more quickly. The Shunra Virtual Enterprise saves us time, effort and resources, and helps us avoid unnecessary risks, re-coding and re-testing," said Cyril Bouteille, Hotwire.com's Software Architect.

The Hotwire.com travel site is accessed by people using many different Internet connections - from slow modems to high-speed broadband and DSL. The Company constantly upgrades and improves its site and tests even the smallest of changes to see how they will impact the system. Hotwire.com's Quality Assurance (QA) team sought to enhance its staging and load testing capabilities by replicating the production Internet environment as accurately as possible, and bringing the quality of remote end-users' experiences into the entire application lifecycle.

"It is critical for us to replicate the true end-user environment, so that our customers get the most positive experience when visiting us on the web. The Shunra Virtual Enterprise gives us a great prediction of real-life production traffic, where we can easily reproduce customer behavior as if these customers were actually accessing the Hotwire.com website from remote locations," said Bouteille. "The Shunra Virtual Enterprise materially enhances our application and network testing, and planning efforts, and is now an integral and strategic part of our application lifecycle process. It provides a controllable staging environment where we safely experiment and test changes to our distributed eCommerce applications and infrastructure, see their impact on the rest of the system, and determine what works best - before deployment. We're particularly pleased with the Shunra Virtual Enterprise's ability to capture and replay the actual production network behavior within the test scenarios, and we are using this capability to baseline our environment and build a library of real-world scenarios."

"A top priority for companies like Hotwire.com, which do all their business over the Internet, is to continually deliver the best customer experience possible, which in turn helps to develop and maintain long-term relationships," said David Hochhauser, VP Marketing at Shunra Software. "We are delighted that Hotwire.com has chosen the Shunra Virtual Enterprise to help ensure a positive experience for every Internet customer. Furthermore, Hotwire.com's best practices approach re-enforces the vital need for IT teams to collaborate and bring the true end-user perspective early into the development lifecycle, eliminating the risks associated with deploying distributed applications."

About Shunra Software
Shunra Software eliminates the risk of delivering distributed IT services. Shunra provides a family of solutions that create a "safe" production environment (i.e. a virtual enterprise) to work in throughout the development lifecycle. This allows software developers, quality assurance, networking, performance and operations professionals to understand the end-user experience in a distributed environment during the development and delivery of new or changed applications and infrastructure. Over 1,400 leading enterprises and technology vendors worldwide are using Shunra's award-winning solutions including 3M, Boeing, Cisco, Dow Chemical, EMC, FedEx, General Electric, General Motors, JPMorgan Chase, Kelly Services, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Nestle, Pitney Bowes, and Vodafone. Shunra Software's US headquarters are located in New York City. The Company maintains sales offices throughout North America, the UK, Israel and Singapore and supports a global network of distributors. For more information, please visit www.shunra.com.