Keynote Systems Announces Its Sites-of-the-Week for April: Four E-Commerce Web Sites Selected for Public Internet Performance Tests

Business Wire, April 5, 1999

SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 5, 1999--

Companies With E-Commerce Web Sites Invited to Compare

Their Quality of Service to These Benchmark Sites

Keynote Systems, the recognized authority on Internet performance, today released the identities of four popular web sites whose quality of service the company will measure in April as part of its ongoing Site-of-the-Week program that makes the performance and availability results of selected sites available free to the public on the World Wide Web at http://web.keynote.com.

Companies with e-commerce web sites signing up for Keynote's free performance appraisal at http://www.keynote.com/newsfpa.html can also compare the performance and availability of their own sites to the Site-of-the-Week. The web sites whose e-commerce quality of service will be visible for public scrutiny for one week each in April as Site-of-the-Week belong to MotherNature.com, National Discount Brokers (NYSE:NDB), VerticalNet (Nasdaq:VERT) and US Airways (NYSE:U).

Anyone with a web browser can view the performance measurements and availability rates of the Site-of-the-Week in real time for the current week and compare them to the industry-standard Keynote Business 40 Index. Keynote will also publish weekly several comparative performance graphs for each Site-of-the-Week on its web site at http://www.keynote.com/measures/sotw/sotw.html .

The four Sites-of-the-Week for April are popular e-commerce sites that sell goods or services to consumers or businesses over the Internet. MotherNature.com is a leading online retailer of vitamins and other natural products. National Discount Brokers is a large Internet brokerage company. VerticalNet operates online business-to-business commerce communities. US Airways is a major U.S. air carrier.

Week: April 5 Company: MotherNature.com Internet Address: http://www.mothernature.com Web-Site Software: Microsoft IIS 4.0 (Nasdaq:MSFT) Internet Access: MCI WorldCom/UUNET (Nasdaq:WCOM)

and AT&T/CERFnet (NYSE:T)

Week: April 12 Company: National Discount Brokers Internet Address: http://www.ndb.com Web-Site Software: Netscape Enterprise 3.0J (NYSE:AOL) Internet Access: PSINet (Nasdaq:PSIX)

Week: April 19 Company: VerticalNet, Inc. Internet Address: http://www.verticalnet.com Web-Site Software: Netscape Enterprise 2.01 on Sun Solaris (Nasdaq:SUNW) Internet Access: Qwest/IconNET (Nasdaq:QWST)

Week: April 26 Company: US Airways Internet Address: http://www.usairways.com Web-Site Software: Netscape Enterprise 2.01 on Sun Solaris Internet Access: MCI WorldCom/UUNET and Sprint (NYSE:FON)

"The quality of service of popular Internet web sites varies over time and users' geography," said Umang Gupta, Chairman and CEO of Keynote Systems. "In conjunction with our subscription service that delivers comparative Internet performance and availability data to our corporate customers, we're pleased to provide a public service each week by highlighting a popular web site and allowing anyone to compare its quality of service to an industry-standard benchmark."

Recent Sites-of-the-Week, whose performance graphs from those weeks have been published on Keynote's web site, include the web sites of The Sharper Image (Nasdaq:SHRP), Priceline.com (Nasdaq:PCLN), Victoria's Secret, a division of Intimate Brands (NYSE:IBI), SkyMall (Nasdaq:SKYM), Broadcast.com (Nasdaq:BCST), Network Solutions (Nasdaq:NSOL) and America Online.

How Keynote Measures Quality of Service

To determine quality of service for its Site-of-the-Week, Keynote Systems uses its Keynote Perspective(TM) service to measure how long it takes to access and download web pages and their components via industry-standard HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), the same protocol used by the Microsoft and Netscape web browsers. The measurements are performed every 15 minutes around the clock from each of Keynote's 72 automated measurement locations around the world which are connected to the Internet via T-1 communication lines. This produces over 48,000 discrete measurements of page downloads and availability rates each week for each of the more than 2,000 web sites whose quality of service Keynote measures for its customers. Performance results and availability rates for the Site-of-the-Week and for the Keynote Business 40 Index are available in real time via Keynote's Web Edition software to anyone with a web browser.

Keynote also offers a free one-week comparative web-site performance appraisal against the Site-of-the-Week and the Keynote Business 40 Index, with its Keynote Perspective service, to any company that develops or operates a business web site with a registered domain name and submits an application online at http://www.keynote.com/newsfpa.html .

The Keynote Business 40 Index is an industry-standard metric and benchmark of the overall health and performance of the Internet that is published weekly in The Industry Standard and other leading business and trade publications. The Index comprises 40 important web sites in six categories of publishing, search engines and directories, business services, financial services, high technology and communications. The Index provides historical and real-time performance measurements for the web sites of Excite (Nasdaq:XCIT), InfoSeek (Nasdaq:SEEK), Yahoo (Nasdaq:YHOO), 3Com (Nasdaq:COMS), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq:CSCO), Dell (Nasdaq:DELL), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HWP), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Novell (Nasdaq:NOVL), Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL), Sun Microsystems and 29 other companies.