Member Article

Testplant Announces the Acquisition of NCC Group’s Web Performance Division and the Re-branding of the Combined Company to Eggplant

Eggplant (formerly Testplant), the provider of Digital Automation Intelligence solutions, today announced the acquisition of NCC Group’s Web Performance Division.

The acquisition adds a SaaS-based, user-centric application performance platform, as well as a portfolio of blue chip customers including Argos, BMW, Barclays, John Lewis, House of Fraser, Sainsbury’s Bank, easyJet, and Auto Trader. Eggplant also gains a team of world-leading testing, monitoring and data science experts focused on the digital experience.

In light of the expanded product offering, Testplant is also rebranding the combined company to Eggplant, the name of its widely recognized leading product suite.

The NCC Group Web Performance offering (which evolved from the company formerly known as ‘Site Confidence’) accelerates the Digital Automation Intelligence vision adding Synthetic Monitoring, Real User Monitoring (RUM), Performance Analysis, Load Testing and Analytics products to the Eggplant Suite and hosted platform immediately. The product suite enhancements will allow Eggplant to offer integrated AI-driven continuous testing and monitoring against critical business objectives. This will enable customers to ‘shift right’ in order to release apps quicker than ever, while continuing their testing in production, identifying live problems, providing predictive analytics and recommendations on bug fixes. Eggplant will be able to enhance DevOps pipelines to link business, development and operations groups, offering customers a faster product delivery, unique visibility and continuous product improvement, while ensuring a digital experience that delights consumers.

Quotes and Commentary Dr. John Bates, CEO of Eggplant, said: “This is a key milestone in our growth strategy and we welcome the NCC Group’s Web Performance team and its customers to our organization. There has never been a greater demand for optimizing digital experiences and with the addition of new products and expertise, Eggplant can now more easily monitor, analyze and enhance the online customer experience, as well as accelerating the speed of delivery, quality and effectiveness of new digital products and services.”

Simon Austin, Technical Director at NCC Group Web Performance, said: “We’ve built a strong offering in the marketplace and are proud of the customers we have in our portfolio. Eggplant has a great reputation in the industry and the combination will offer customers a new and innovative model for continuous business assurance, allowing them to deliver the very best in digital services, products and experiences to their own customers.”

“Eggplant’s Digital Automation Intelligence has enabled us to accelerate automation and quality across our commerce platforms. Now we’re eager to see how Eggplant’s addition of user experience monitoring and analytics can provide more intelligence around how to continuously improve our business performance and Push Possible™,” said Harmit Wadhwa, Senior Director Product Development, Manhattan Associates.

Diego Lo Giudice, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester writes that “post-production customer and user metrics complete the story. Customer experience (CX) metrics give teams visibility into delivered business value and expose opportunities for further improvement. Metrics like client clicks, page or feature usage, user satisfaction, and completed transactions help developers gauge a customer’s experience, which in turn helps them deliver better solutions.”

In the same report, he notes that “Customers use applications to achieve business outcomes, and measuring these outcomes helps organizations improve CX and customer loyalty. While CX teams and other business stakeholders measure the overall customer experience, developers can leverage more tactical data such as client clicks, page or feature usage, and completed transactions to understand why an outcome is good or bad.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by John Bates .