The need to stay profitable and to grow revenue has led enterprises to ensure that they stay on top of quality, performance, and availability of their mission-critical systems and applications. Performance is no longer a choice; it directly affects revenue through customer experience and operational efficiencies.
“Performance 2.0 is about enabling performance across people, systems, and processes”, says Shashank Srivastava, Head of Global Marketing and Product Management at Cavisson Systems Inc. “Over the years we’ve innovated with our customers and have seen them demanding more than the conventional performance testing and monitoring that was typically available to them. Being visionaries, the quest was to offer the best possible user experience. And, that’s been our mission ever since – to offer exceptional user experience”, quoted Shashank.
Typically, companies have been doing performance testing, monitoring, and diagnostics of their systems and applications with a minimum of 3 to even 5 or 6 different tools, yet not being able to address certain issues that crop up during production.
The challenges are many. To ensure these tools work in an integrated environment is one but to ensure they are able to share and correlate data across all these tools has always been a major concern. Enterprises end up creating a dashboard of dashboards on top of these tools just to have a consolidated view but are still not able to drill down to the root cause. The result is overlapping features and functionalities yet having a database, network, and application teams clueless about the root cause of the user/customer struggle.
From the very start, Cavisson has been focused on addressing real-world business challenges, and it continues to evolve its products with customer needs. “Over time, we’ve created an end-to-end, full stack offering in the performance engineering space, which no other company offers today. There are two sets of offerings, one for Testing and the other for Monitoring and Diagnostics,” says Anil Kumar, Founder, and CTO of Cavisson Systems.
Cavisson focused its technological advancements and innovations around customer experience, as well as business parameters that directly impact revenue and operating costs. “This immediately resonates with customers. We ensured that quality and performance is in the DNA of any system or application right from the dev or pre-pod environment,” Anil adds.
Using Cavisson’s advanced cross-discipline simulation techniques, customers are able to performance test their applications with real production-like scenarios and repeatable results to ensure maximum performance once the application goes live. Cavisson pioneered this concept and named it InternetTrueTM technology. Cavisson also offers a fast, single-click root-cause analysis whenever there’s an issue in production. This is achieved by the combination of a proprietary big data engine that captures data from all parts of the enterprise and several high-performance computing algorithms that perform complex computations on the data in real-time. “This is in turn combined with optimized machine learning algorithms for analyzing trends to do anomaly detection. We call this our Key DataTM technology”, says Anil.
Cavisson’s performance testing suite helps organizations create performance tests that are reflective of real-life situations. It provides a real-life measure of customer experience via highly realistic simulations of the load model and several significant parameters that impact this experience, including traffic behavior, exact production transactions, network and bandwidth parameters, and user behavioral patterns such as click-aways and reloads when response times are slow. Cavisson is the only solution provider in the world today offering a comprehensive end-to-end monitoring and diagnostics solution ensuring a 360-degree view of the enterprise including but not limited to the client-side / browser, network, applications, systems, databases, and other components, as well as log patterns.
Cavisson built an unparalleled, highly innovative solution currently used by several Fortune 100 customers worldwide. “We believe that our InternetTrueTM and Key DataTM technologies are the future of performance engineering. And, that’s the reason why forward-thinking enterprises have chosen Cavisson as their enterprise strategy for performance engineering!”, says Anil.
What is it like being the ‘Director of Marketing’ at Cavisson Systems Inc.?
I joined Cavisson as their first marketing employee. Like any traditional tech-startup, Cavisson was an engineering organization and my charter is to transform it into a marketing and sales driven organization. I have all the luxury to innovate and experiment, except time and hence I have to ask my team to follow a fail-fast approach as we compete and operate in an extremely demanding marketplace.
Tell us about the various products and services offered?
Cavisson products can be categorized into two segments – 1. Performance Testing and 2. Monitoring and diagnostics. Performance testing suite comprises of performance testing and capacity analysis solution along with service virtualization and network virtualization solution. Performance testing solution (NetStorm) is a suite of offering in itself and brings capabilities for load testing, real-device testing, real-browser user testing, along with test suite automation, for the web, mobile as well as desktop or thick client applications. Idea is to enable organizations to reproduce issues early in the application lifecycle that is likely to impact revenue and fix them. On the other side, monitoring and diagnostics suite comprises of customer experience monitoring platform, a comprehensive application performance and network monitoring solution and a powerful log monitoring and analysis solution. Cavisson monitoring and diagnostics solution is extremely unique as it’s the only solution currently that offers end-to-end performance monitoring and diagnostics. End-to-end monitoring can be applied to the test environment also.
Backed by 20 years of experience in the field of marketing, tell us about your journey so far?
The journey has been eventful so far. Have worked with startups as well as more than a billion dollar in revenue organizations and hence had a pleasure of working with some of the smartest people in the business. I have been blessed to have the best mentors along the journey as well as great coworkers to make my job at work thoroughly enjoyable. As they say, time flies when you are having fun, and literally never felt it’s been more than 2 decades already.
Describe a project you previously worked on which you found the most challenging?
Every assignment was challenging but let me talk about the recent one. Performance domain was new to me and it required deep knowledge, whereas I was coming from a middleware and integration technology background. The need was to hit the ground running and within 3 months into my job I was wearing multiple hats – marketing, product management, and tech pubs. The good thing was that I was working closely with Anil Kumar, the founder, and CTO, as well as Neeraj Jain, VP Engineering, who introduced and provided details of the technology side to get me up to the speed. The challenge was to create a self-sustaining infrastructure and set processes in place along with putting together a team of brilliant minds to drive global marketing, product management, sales and pre-sales functions. Here I am after 3 years managing all of it with help of a stellar 30 people team. Now, the challenge is to take it to next level.
How is digitalization impacting the marketing domain?
I can only talk about the software and IT industry. Very quickly, it’s helped marketers to stay focused, focus on target audience, tighten the messaging, improve ROI in terms of conversions, But, the biggest impact is that it has made competition fair for smaller companies and startups as well. Even the organizations with lesser marketing dollars can have significant visibility and impact provided their vision, strategy and execution are right.
Tell us something about Performance 2.0 and the factors that are currently shaping up enterprise performance engineering landscape?
Performance 2.0 is about the shift in performance engineering landscape. The shift is because of the changing technology dynamics because of the two biggest drivers within the industry: 1. Impact on revenue and profitability, and 2. Competition. Performance 2.0 is driven by these parameters and focuses on performance across all business domains: people, systems, and processes. Performance 2.0 helps organizations to focus on user performance (customer or user experience), systems, network, and application component performance, as well as business performance and allow them to analyze the impact of performance on business.
What do you think it takes to be an effective business leader in the face of this rapidly changing environment?
Have a clear vision. Hire the right people to do the job. Trust your team and empower them with what it takes to make them successful in their jobs and career.