The Cloudcast

Brian talks with James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart, Senior Vice President of Performance Analytics @SOASTA) about the evolution of the digital economy, performance testing applications, understanding business impact of performance, and how companies are evolving in this new economy.

Show Notes:

• Krispy Kreme Challenge Donations - https://www.crowdrise.com/thecloudcastkrispykr/fundraiser/briangracely

• SOASTA Homepage - http://www.soasta.com/

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show, it’s been a little while. Tell us what you’re doing these days.

Topic 2 - We now live in a (mostly) digital world, where applications are the face or experience of many businesses. Where does SOASTA fit into this new world?

Topic 3 - Last summer, I was at VelocityConf and saw this massive display (for SOASTA) and it looked like the control center in movies for a Space Shuttle launch. Turns out it was the launch of the mPulse platform. It was very business centric, which was unique and unusual for a highly technical conference.

Topic 4 - Lots of talk about microservices and distributed applications. Also, lots of talk about how this becomes orders of magnitude more complex. How are application teams explaining this to their businesses, and how does SOASTA help them manage this?

Topic 5 - Mobile devices are everything these days, and they have very different usage/access patterns. From a Performance/Analysis perspective, what are some of the most important things companies need to think about?

Topic 6 - We’re starting to see more and more traditionally “non-technical” companies that will have massive application challenges in the future (e.g. connected vehicles). What’s your advice to them beyond just “be sure you’re testing early and often”?