Congratulations to Dynatrace-Keynote, But Please Get Your Facts Straight

The web performance monitoring community is a special niche of the larger IT industry; it’s undoubtedly a small world. It’s just not as small as Dynatrace and Keynote apparently believe it to be.

After Thoma Bravo acquired both companies several months ago, it was obvious that a merger was forthcoming, with the public announcement being made this morning. And before we get into anything else, let us first congratulate all those involved for working out what had to be a very complicated partnership agreement, and wish them the best of luck on this new venture.

That being said, included in that announcement were some claims that are, frankly, incorrect. Let’s take them one at a time, starting with the real doozy:

The new company is “the world’s only third party web service monitoring system.”

Yeah, that might be true…

We get that they’re excited about their merger, but that doesn’t mean they get to just make stuff up. Let’s start with the fact that Catchpoint itself was founded as an alternative monitoring system to Keynote and what was then Gomez because a group of performance experts at Google and DoubleClick knew that there was a need in the market for a better product. And it’s not as if we’re the only other option out there, either.

The new company is “the world’s largest synthetic testing network.”

We’re not going to claim to have all of the inside information on their node infrastructure, but as of now we have 311 backbone nodes, 69 of which are IPv6, which is nearly a hundred more than what they have (even after the merger), and over three times as many IPv6. Our backbone node infrastructure also encompasses 126 cities in 59 different countries, including 113 in the U.S., 89 in Europe, and 31 in China. Every one of those numbers is larger than those sported by the combined stockpile of Dynatrace and Keynote.

Catchpoint also has a stable of 35 different wireless 4G and 3G nodes (with 24/7 synthetic testing capability) in 11 different U.S. cities, which we’re confident is the most in the industry.

The new company offers “the world’s most powerful root-cause analytics.”

While they do have APM for application visibility and we don’t, when it comes to root-cause analysis, it’s about more than just power. It’s critical to be able to find out that you have a problem and where it exists in your stack in as little time as possible, and without breaking the bank. With today’s IT budgets encompassing a wide range of products and services that cost a lot of money, not everyone can afford to buy the works, and even those who can still understand the need to maximize the value of the dollars they’re spending on monitoring. That’s where our synthetic offering truly shines.

Like we said, we wish the new company the best of luck. We just wanted to set the record straight.