HP to Let Partners Host LoadRunner

IDG News Service — Hewlett-Packard's LoadRunner performance validation software will become available on a hosted basis through HP partners, the company announced Tuesday.

LoadRunner software emulates hundreds or thousands of concurrent users so that businesses can test how their application will behave under heavy loads. It identifies where bottlenecks are happening so that users can correct problems that may be impacting application performance.

Now, HP is making LoadRunner available to service providers starting with Orasi Software, Genilogix and J9 Technologies, which will offer a hosted, on-demand version of the software to businesses.

"We're offering it to partners partly because we're targeting this offering to the band of customers typically served by these partners," said Matt Morgan, senior director of product and solution marketing in HP's software group.

While large enterprises find it makes economic sense for them to buy the software and use it in-house for testing, smaller organizations, which typically don't have large IT groups, would prefer to sign up for a hosted version and pay just for what they use.

The on-demand version of LoadRunner offers the same capabilities as the on-premise software version. Both allow users to test applications that are running on in-house servers or public cloud services and to test virtually any kind of application.

LoadRunner may be particularly appealing to the many smaller companies using public clouds, Morgan said. "When using these external providers ... it becomes critical that you are getting the performance you're paying for. Without validating it yourself, you're trusting the SLAs," he said, referring to service level agreements.

Pricing of the on-demand offerings will depend on the service provider, Morgan said.

Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy's e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com