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How London Prepared For The First Mobile Olympics

This article is more than 10 years old.

Here’s a nice Moore’s Law scenario for you: 15 years ago it took 6-8 weeks and $1 million to test a web application with a load of 4000 concurrent users. And that was just for the software license - you’d still be on the hook for the servers. These days that same test, servers included, takes a couple of days and $1000. That's one tenth of one percent of the cost 15 years ago.

We’ve come a long way baby.

We can thank the cloud for that steep drop in price, along with a company called SOASTA for blazing the way. Founded in 2006,  SOASTA rents out servers from cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and HP to mimic the effect of thousands of people looking at a website at once. The company helped TurboTax prepare their website for tax day, Hallmark for Valentine's Day and Activision launch Guitar Hero III before Christmas. Their latest project is London2012.org, the official website of the London Olympics.

In prepping for the games, SOASTA performed 500 tests on the Olympic website and mobile apps, simulating the browsing of 400,000 concurrent users in its largest. "The Committee had the foresight to see that this is really the first mobile Olympics,” CEO Tom Lounibos said, noting that a large percentage of the world's five billion mobile devices will interact with the Olympics at some point over the three weeks.  Apparently Beijing was a bit too early for such a moniker and Vancouver, well, no one pays all that much attention to the winter Olympics.

London's 'Results' app is currently the #5 free download for the iPhone and the top trending app in the Android app store.

In a statement, the Olympic Committee's Lead Web Architect Paul Bunnell said, “The official London 2012 web site will be one of the most visited web sites on the planet during the three-week games."

The committee began working with SOASTA six months ago after some trouble with the Olympic ticketing website.

During testing, the company pulls together performance analytics to let clients know if a design issue, like a Flash-heavy page, is slowing things down - or something murkier, like a faulty ISP in Hong Kong. SOASTA typically finds hundreds of potential problems with varying priority. "It's more about risk mitigation at that point," says Lounibos. "But you can generally mitigate risks pretty well."

Based in Mountain View, SOASTA has raised a total of $32.7 million in venture capital over five rounds since its founding. The company uses a pay-as-you-go model where clients can pay as little as a few hundred dollars for an hour of testing or up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for dozens of larger tests. Steadier customers pay annual fees in five and six figures for unlimited assessments. Though Lounibos won’t reveal revenue numbers, he will say that sales are doubling each year.

Lounibos previously served as CEO of Kenamea, a web-messaging service, and Dorado, which provided enterprise software to lending firms. Founder and Executive Chairman Ken Gardener founded Sagent, a business intelligence software company that went public in 1999. He sold his Istante Software to Oracle in 2004.

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