We had some custom in-house built things that weren't part of a centralized monitoring strategy. This was kind of new territory for us. "Greenfield," as we call it, so this is kind of our first foray into the true customer experience, the user experience space, and it's been a good one so far.

Prior to me being part of the team, I know that IBM tried to create synthetic transactions for our call center application, and they weren't successful at it. What HPE provided was a toolset that works across multiple platforms. We found a tool that worked for our particular platform, we were able to create the scripts to perform the synthetic transactions that other vendors weren't able to do. They were trying to customize something for a particular application, to be able to record a transaction as it was being made, and they couldn't do it and have it played back successfully. Before that, they tried to use WinRunner. Then the attempt with HPE, we were able to do it, and do it quickly.

We were not using any mobile application monitoring solution before. When we deployed our mobile banking application, we didn't know if we were having trouble with specific devices or with specific operating systems, or if the problem was critical or not. Unfortunately, it was not pro-active. We deployed to production and then we implemented the monitoring, but the idea was to know exactly the user experience of our customers and then take actions to improve the service.

We had our own built-in analytics and it was only capturing a small iota of interactions our users were having with our app. We’re a small company so we didn’t know how to capture all the analytics and tag them manually. We needed to have more metrics, know where to store the metrics, and what to do with those metrics.

I was using Google Analytics where you have to choose where you put your tags, whereas AppPulse Mobile gives me a bird’s eye view.

We are also using One4Mobile at the moment.

It is quite easy, but we took a long time to set up because of past problems, currently it’s very easy to set up.

We did what we called a benchmark, or survey, and we found this solution fit our needs and requirements, in particular its ability to help in understanding the customers.