Keynote acquires NetRaker

Keynote Systems last week announced it has for an undisclosed sum acquired NetRaker, a California company that collects and manages data to track online customer experiences.

Keynote executives say the acquisition will bolster the company’s Web site, multimedia, streaming and other online data management products with customer experience management offerings.

“[Keynote with the NetRaker acquisition] delivers a best-practices approach for ensuring that e-business is optimized for speed, reliability, load, content and usability. If performance is sub-par on any one of these measures, especially usability, e-business effectiveness and the bottom line can suffer,” Keynote Chairman and CEO Umang Gupta said in a statement.

Keynote says NetRaker applications and services are expected to contribute about $500,000 to Keynote’s fiscal third-quarter results, ending June 30. Keynote also estimates NetRaker will garner between $3 million and $5 million for the company in fiscal 2005.  In addition to getting NetRaker technologies such as ResearchManager and Customer Benchmark Index, Keynote will add a majority of NetRaker employees to its staff.

ResearchManager is a research and analysis application that supports a series of Web site evaluation features. Customer Benchmark Index (formerly NetRaker Index) is a technology that provides site evaluation metrics from a Web site visitor’s perspective.

Keynote’s customer management products include WebEffective, a hosted service for capturing the actual behavior of site visitors. Keynote has integrated NetRaker’s application and services into online “opt-in” and “directed” customer experience management (including NetRaker Research Manager) with WebEffective, creating the Keynote WebEffective Intelligence Platform (WIP). Keynote executives are describing WIP as “a Web experience research and usability testing solution.”

The company says WIP, now with enhanced technologies from NetRaker, can help companies determine how to best design their Web sites to meet visitors’ ideal expectations. For example, WIP will help companies understand why people visit the Web site, what they experience while there and whether the end users consider their visit successful.

According to Keynote, WIP can gather and correlate attitude, behavior and performance data from a selected panel or a random sample of real visitors to provide suggestions for Web or IT managers to improve the effectiveness of a Web site. Also, WIP is delivered as a managed research application, or as an appliance that can be hosted internally by the client.