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CarsDirect.com Moves Into the Fast Lane With Mercury Interactive's Hosted Load Testing Service

5 June 2000

CarsDirect.com Moves Into the Fast Lane With Mercury Interactive's Hosted Load Testing Service

    Leading Auto Portal Uses LoadRunner ActiveTest to Attain Critical Site
                                 Performance

    SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 5 Mercury Interactive Corporation , the world's leading provider
of Web performance management solutions, today announced that CarsDirect.com
has adopted LoadRunner(R) ActiveTest(TM) for stress testing its
consumer-focused automotive pricing and purchasing Web portal to ensure a
positive end user experience. CarsDirect.com is a leading automotive
e-commerce retailer and the first nationwide online service that puts
consumers in control of the total car buying experience.
    CarsDirect.com has growing numbers of car buyers doing everything they
would do at a dealership, including obtaining financing and arranging for home
or office delivery. In a drive to improve the quality, efficiency and
reliability of its site, CarsDirect.com evaluated tools from several vendors,
and chose ActiveTest, the hosted Web load testing e-service from Mercury
Interactive powered by LoadRunner, the leading Web load testing solution.
    "We need our Web storefront to run at peak performance 24 X 7," said
Bob Peterson, vice president of enterprise systems for CarsDirect.com.
"ActiveTest identifies bottlenecks, pinpoints capacity constraints and
stress-tests our entire site, giving us the ability to provide customers with
optimum site performance, which is critical to our continued success.
ActiveTest gives us the security of knowing spikes in traffic will not impact
site performance, and keeps customers from leaving our site due to slow
response time or errors in business processes."
    Using a hosted, Web-based load testing e-service like ActiveTest enables
CarsDirect.com to test their site quickly, without having to dedicate a lot of
internal resources to the effort. The result is that thousands of
CarsDirect.com site customers can quickly find the car they want at the price
they want.
    "Today's e-commerce retailers know that competition is just a click away,
and a customer lost once may be lost for good," said Kay Keller, senior
product marketing manager for Mercury Interactive. "Smart e-tailers like
CarsDirect.com realize that user experience and site response time are big
indicators of continued success, and that any downtime can be debilitating. By
selecting ActiveTest, CarsDirect.com is achieving its goals of prompt,
reliable service, and high customer retention."

    ActiveTest: A Hosted e-Service That Offers 24-hour Turnaround
    As a hosted e-service, ActiveTest enables organizations to optimize the
performance of a Web site by identifying bottlenecks and pinpointing capacity
constraints. With 24-hour turnaround, ActiveTest can stress test an entire Web
infrastructure to deliver critical time-to-market advantage to e-Businesses.
Powered by Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner, ActiveTest remotely stress tests
Web sites with virtual traffic before going live. The information provided by
ActiveTest can be used to analyze how the load on a Web site is affecting
Service Level Agreements or other performance thresholds. For example, an
organization may have the goal to complete a user transaction in eight seconds
or less, but as more users are added, the site may become unacceptably slow.
With interactive, real time graphs and reports, ActiveTest provides
organizations with the ability to identify and fix such problems before users
are driven away to other sites.

    About Mercury Interactive
    Mercury Interactive is the leading provider of Web performance management
solutions that help e-businesses deliver a positive user experience. Mercury
Interactive solutions enable its customers to turn Web application
performance, scalability and user experience into competitive advantage. The
company's performance management products and hosted services are open and
integrated to best test and monitor business-critical Web applications.
    More than 10,000 business to business and business to consumer
e-businesses, Internet Service Providers, Applications Service Providers,
systems integrators, consultants, and other customers use Mercury Interactive
solutions.
    Mercury Interactive is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and has
40 offices worldwide. The company can be reached at http://www.mercuryinteractive.com
or by phone at U.S. 408-822-5200.
    NOTE:  LoadRunner is a registered trademark and ActiveTest is a trademark
of Mercury Interactive Corporation, Sunnyvale, California. Product and company
names are used herein for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks
of their respective companies.