Compuware To Acquire Gomez: Will This Change How CDNs Measure Performance?

This morning, Compuware announced an agreement to acquire Gomez in an all cash transaction valued at $295M and expects the deal to close next month. I last wrote about Gomez a year ago when they launched their new streaming media monitoring service called Active Streaming XF. While I don't know much about Compuware or the application performance software industry, I wonder if the sale of Gomez will have any impact on the CDNs who use Gomez today.

Currently, many of the CDNs use Gomez to monitor the performance of their network and while I have said many times the methodology used to measure the performance of one CDN to another are invalid, Gomez still seems to be what nearly all the CDNs are using when a customer asks them for third party performance data.

The reason each CDN shows a different result in their Gomez chart is due to the fact that the CDNs are all using different metrics to test. Most are showing the chart as if it represents video, yet might just be testing small objects and not video objects. Also, many times, some CDNs that use Gomez tweak the testing methods to be in their favor even if it is not a fair apple-to-apples comparison to other vendors.

With Gomez now being sold, I wonder what, if any, impact this might have on CDNs currently using their service. I also find it hard to believe that for an industry that uses the word "performance" more than any other word to describe their service, I have yet to see any CDN publish any public document that outlines the performance of their network or even the methodology that customers should be using to judge "performance". None of the CDNs have even defined in a public document what the word "performance" means when it comes to video.