SaaS based offering based on open source Jmeter project
For anyone who has worked in the load and performance testing space or who has had to approve a budget for that as part of your development costs, you know that it is a crazy expensive and time consuming exercise. The folks at Blazemeter say that they have built “not a cloud testing service, but a testing cloud.” In the same way Amazon built a cloud based on Xen and Hiroku on Ruby, Blazemeter is build on Jmeter, the Apache open source performance and load testing project.
Alon says Blazemeter is more than just Jmeter on a cloud though. They are making it even easier for anyone to load and performance test. They have no scripting options, better reporting and enterprise class stability. In case you were wondering Girmonsky says that this is a 2.6 billion dollar market, so there is certainly a pot of gold at the end of the cloud if Blazemeter can succeed. More than enough to make new investor YL Ventures a nice return on their money.
For anyone though who thinks they can take an open source project raise some money and make an instant company, be warned. Girmonsky and team have been working on Blazemeter for years. Not days, weeks or months, but years. In the chicken and egg story, no one gives you money until you have something to show. Not since the Internet bubble have VCs funded just ideas.
I had a chance to sit down with Alon last week to discuss Blazemeter, the open source market, the testing market and of course the cloud. The conversation is about 16 minutes long and I think you will find it interesting!
