Startup Replay: The TiVo Of Software

Startup Replay Solutions has mostly (re)played in the gaming world, with customers like Electronic Arts, Vivendi, and Microsoft, but now it's moving into financial services and other verticals with its TiVo-like ability to re-create and play back application sessions for quality assurance and testing.

I had a chance to talk to Replay CEO Jonathan Lindo, who says that the complexity of service-oriented architecture and multitier Web applications in general creates the need to understand, test for, and assure performance and scalability. That's always been the case, but the testing has usually involved building test loads with simulation tools, and trying to re-create user environments when things go wrong.

Replay claims its software sits as a small footprint agent on the Web application server, captures everything that executes (including user inputs, network inputs, REST calls, and database transactions) and then lets you replay it exactly as it happened, thus allowing you to pinpoint (and fast-forward to) what went wrong. They call this application execution virtualization technology -- not too catchy, but pretty descriptive.