Tom Lounibos

It's always exciting to be on the front end of a trend.  Some turn out to be short-lived fads while others, such as the electronic distribution of music, disrupt entire industries.  There are some who see cloud computing as a fad. Those who share that view tend to look at the Cloud as if it's an all or nothing proposition; if you can't move your entire infrastructure to the Cloud it must certainly be a passing fancy. But the Cloud is here to stay.  There are many applications, like compute intensive statistical analysis, business intelligence and testing, that are incredibly well-suited for cloud computing.  We're proud to have been first in the Cloud with a commercial testing solution and have been keen observers of the evolution of testing in the Cloud.  What have we seen? First, it's getting more crowded.  The benefits of testing from the Cloud are just too obvious... (more)

Cloud Executive Changes Hats

Experience Matters! As a vendor In an emerging hot market segment (such as Cloud Computing) it is often difficult to find executives that have experience in that particular domain. This week, we (feel) as if we caught lightening in a bottle with the addition of Betsy Zikakis the former VP of Marketing at Rightscale as our new SVP of Marketing. We are clearly thrilled to have Betsy, as she comes to us at the perfect time in our companies young history.   We now have over (200) leading consumer facing companies using CloudTest to test their websites.  We have some incredible cloud ... (more)

The 2010 Cloud Capacity Surge

SOASTA has held a unique position in the cloud community, allowing us to watch its evolution over the years. As one of only a few enterprise cloud applications, on any given day we may be looking for up to 10,000 cloud servers to simulate millions of virtual consumers for performance testing some of the world’s leading consumer web sites. With this in mind, we have had to be incredibly aware of the supply side of cloud computing. With this in mind, I’m happy to report that 2010 has been a very good year for cloud capacity growth (availability of cloud servers), as well as the ela... (more)

Web 2.0: Why Has Web Testing Failed Us?

Last February on a business trip to London, I had a typical day that included several calls back to the U.S. and India. Instead of using my mobile phone or an expensive hotel landline to make the calls, I decided to use my Skype account. Although (at times) not the greatest quality, this web service has proven to save a lot of money on my overseas calls. However, on this particular day when I attempted to log into Skype I experienced some technical issues that would not allow me to access my account. When I finally went to Skype's web site to see if there was a problem, I found t... (more)

SOASTA's 10,000 Hours in the Cloud

SOASTA at Cloud Expo “Practice makes perfect” is an adage heard by everyone from budding pianists to ambitious athletes. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell focuses on exceptional people who don’t fit into our normal definition of achievers. A common theme in explaining the successes of these individuals is the “10,000 Hour Rule.” Gladwell’s theory suggests that high performance is, in large part, the result of putting in an enormous amount of time, and that it takes about 10,000 hours to gain the experience necessary to achieve greatness. The rule, according to Gladwell, ap... (more)