Dollar Thrifty Primes Car Rental Web Sites for Busy Summer Season Using Web Performance Load Testing from Gomez
Proactive Load Tests of Redesigned Web Sites Helped Find and Fix Performance Bottlenecks
DETROIT June 8, 2009
Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc. (NYSE: DTG) is ready for the peak summer car rental season, thanks to proactively load testing its two redesigned Web sites using solutions from Gomez, Inc. (www.gomez.com), the leader in Web application experience management. The on-demand load tests revealed performance bottlenecks that Dollar Thrifty remedied prior to rolling out its new sites in time for its busiest season.
The www.dollar.com and www.thrifty.com sites had both undergone significant redesigns to personalize and optimize the online rental car experience. With significant revenue generated from its Web sites, Dollar Thrifty needed to be certain the redesigned sites would perform optimally for all customers under peak loads that exceeded previous volumes.
Given the complexities of its Web applications, Dollar Thrifty needed a solution that could test how its multi-tiered sites performed under load from its customers' perspective. It chose Gomez's service because it tests from the "outside-in", the only way to preview how all the components of a Web application, including third party content and services, perform under load and to find potential performance problems anywhere in the complex Web application delivery chain. Gomez does this by uniquely combining load generated from the cloud with load generated from the Gomez Last Mile™ network of 80,000 desktops. This approach meant Dollar Thrifty could create real-world, production-equivalent loads and preview how its web experience would scale under these conditions across all key markets.
The test did indeed expose a number of specific issues. It revealed an imbalance in capacity between the two sites and exposed that network traffic was in some cases being driven to legacy systems. Thanks to these insights, Dollar Thrifty reallocated servers and adjusted load balancing and successfully launched its Web sites.
"The performance of our Web sites is key to profitability, especially during the summer season," said Charlie Coniglio, Dollar Thrifty's Vice President of Marketing and eCommerce. "Given the investments we made in their redesign and our commitment to delivering the best online car rental experience, we had to load test, without a doubt. Gomez's solution helped us find and fix performance issues that other load testing approaches might have missed, and then launch our new sites with confidence."
Dollar Thrifty also appreciated how, unlike traditional load testing options, Gomez's solution was easy to set-up and execute on-demand. Furthermore, since it already uses Gomez's active Web performance monitoring services for its production sites, Dollar Thrifty was easily able to port its existing test scripts to the load project, making ramp-up and execution even faster.
"Any redesign or infrastructure change can impact the way a web application performs for end-users, and peak traffic adds another element of risk," said Matt Poepsel, Gomez's VP of Performance Strategies. "Old style load testing only tests from behind-the-firewall. Load testing from the cloud only provides volume. Gomez's approach is the only solution to load test from the browser to the data center, providing the truest picture of how load impacts the end-users' web experience."
About Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc.
Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc. is a Fortune 1000 company headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Driven by the mission "Value Every Time," the Company's brands, Dollar Rent A Car and Thrifty Car Rental, serve value-conscious travelers in over 70 countries. Dollar and Thrifty have over 700 corporate and franchised locations in the United States and Canada, operating in virtually all of the top U.S. and Canadian airport markets. The Company's approximately 6,800 employees are located mainly in North America, but global service capabilities exist through an expanding international franchise network. For additional information, visit www.dtag.com or the brand sites at www.dollar.com and www.thrifty.com.
About Gomez
Gomez, the Web performance division of Compuware, provides the industry's leading solutions for optimizing the performance, availability, and quality of Web and mobile applications. The on-demand Gomez platform integrates solutions for Web load testing, Web performance management, Web cross-browser testing, and Web performance business analysis that test and measure Web and mobile applications from the "outside-in" — across all users, browsers, devices, and geographies — using a global network of over 100,000 locations. When combined with Compuware Vantage, Gomez offers the industry's only solution for optimizing application performance across the Enterprise and the Internet. Over 2,500 customers worldwide, ranging from small companies to large enterprises — including 12 of the top 20 most visited US Web sites — use Gomez solutions to increase revenue, build brand loyalty, and decrease costs.
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Compuware Corporation
Founded in 1973, Compuware provides software, experts and best practices to ensure applications work well and deliver business value. Compuware solutions optimize application performance across the Enterprise and the Internet for leading businesses around the world, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited U.S. web sites. Learn more at: http://www.compuware.com.
Press Contact
Samantha McGarry
Gomez Division, Compuware Corporation
(781) 778-2783
smcgarry@gomez.com
