The Maricopa Community Colleges Selects Empirix to Test Performance of World's Largest PeopleSoft Enterprise Student Administration Implementation

Business Wire, March 14, 2005

BEDFORD, Mass. -- Empirix load tests helped the community of colleges ready a PeopleSoft rollout for a quarter of a million students and 11,500 faculty

Empirix Inc., the leader in helping organizations strengthen customer loyalty through assured Web and voice application performance, announced today that it recently completed testing of what is believed to be the world's largest PeopleSoft Enterprise Student Administration implementation. The customer was the Maricopa Community Colleges (Arizona), one of the nation's largest community college districts, with over a quarter of a million students annually and 11,500 employees across 10 nationally accredited colleges.

PeopleSoft Enterprise Student Administration enables organizations to manage all of their student services and business operations via common Web pages. As part of the Maricopa Community Colleges community, PeopleSoft is at the heart of the district's IT services, enabling critical transactions such as course registration, grade posting and transcript creation.

Director of Strategic Technology at the Maricopa Community Colleges, Miguel Corzo, knew that pre-deployment testing was essential. "We've all heard horror stories about major application rollouts that failed," said Corzo. "To avoid that same fate, we were meticulous about testing, and we wanted a testing solution that was designed specifically for Web applications." After an evaluation, in which the criteria included visual scripting techniques, re-use of regression tests for load testing, the ability to write and modify scripts using code as well as overall ease of use, the Maricopa Community Colleges selected Empirix e-TEST(R) suite, and also used Empirix consultants for peak volume testing.

Using Empirix's Rapid Bottleneck Identification methodology and the e-TEST suite software, Empirix consultants ensured that the Maricopa Community Colleges' infrastructure and the PeopleSoft software could handle an expected load of 15,000 concurrent users. As a result, Empirix and the Maricopa Community Colleges team, working with experts from the district's hardware provider Hewlett Packard and PeopleSoft consultants, were able to identify several key areas for improvement and make changes to the infrastructure and applications that would optimize performance.

"The Empirix testing validated our architecture choices. It gave us the confidence we needed that the application and our infrastructure would scale to handle an institution serving over a quarter of a million students annually," said Corzo. "Most importantly, the testing and subsequent changes helped us deliver a rock-solid PeopleSoft application to our user community - and that's what it's all about."

Empirix CEO Edward Goldfinger commended Corzo and his team for their rigorous approach to testing. "The Maricopa Community Colleges team went beyond what most organizations do to ensure a great experience for their users," said Goldfinger. "We are delighted that they selected Empirix for this important project, and pleased that we could help their IT team improve the quality of an application that will be so critical to the entire Maricopa Community Colleges community."

Download a free case study on the Maricopa Community Colleges PeopleSoft testing project

For more detail on the Maricopa Community Colleges PeopleSoft testing project, visit http://www.empirix.com/maricopa to download the case study. For more detail on Empirix's e-TEST suite, visit http://www.empirix.com, call 1-866-EMPIRIX or send email to info@empirix.com.

About Empirix

Empirix Inc. helps organizations strengthen customer loyalty through assured Web and voice application performance. Based on patented technologies, Empirix solutions are known for providing the deepest, most accurate insight into what customers actually experience, and enabling organizations to be proactive about identifying and addressing potential technology problems before customers are impacted. Empirix has thousands of customers around the world, with operations throughout North America, Europe and Asia. To learn more, visit www.empirix.com or call 1-866-EMPIRIX.

Empirix, e-TEST suite and OneSight are trademarks or registered trademarks of Empirix Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.