Recently a client asked me “What’s the difference between LoadRunner and Performance Center? They’re both sold by the same company, but they seem to do much the same thing.”
I think he could see that I was about to launch into a half-hour lecture on the topic because he quickly added “Just give me the elevator pitch”.
I thought for a second and explained “Well, obviously they are both used for performance testing, but Performance Center is the Enterprise version of LoadRunner; so it suits larger companies who need to run performance testing for multiple projects at the same time without the problem of sharing a Controller or purchasing duplicate licenses.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and said “That’s an okay pitch, but it has one big problem. Let’s go and get a coffee, and I’ll tell you what I think of when I hear someone say ‘enterprise software’.”
Here are my notes from the conversation:
| Enterprise Software | Shrinkwrap Software |
|---|---|
| Is sold to a very small number of customers (due to the size of the market for something so specialised), so the development costs must be amortised over fewer sales. Expect a 6 or 7 figure price tag. | Large consumer market. Sold cheaply to a large number of customers. |
| Generally has complicated pricing that makes it difficult to compare other products that solve the same problem. Prices are often not public, meaning you have to ask a sales person. Quoted prices might vary depending on who is asking. | Simple pricing with one or two versions (e.g. “standard”, and “pro”). Prices listed on a website. |
| Because of its price tag, it must be sold to upper management. It has a long sales cycle involving lots of meetings with sales people and pre-sales consultants. Sale must align to corporate budget cycle. May involve perks such as being invited to a corporate box at the Grand Prix. Cost of sale is very high. | Probably sold by a website with no interaction with a real person. Paid for out of petty cash, with little or no “approval process” red tape. Short sales cycle. |
| The product is sold to people who are not going to use it themselves. This creates mis-aligned incentives as features are added that are unimportant to the users, but sound good to their managers’ manager (auditability, tracability, visibility, reporting, compliance with corporate IT policies or platforms) | Features are driven by the users who will buy the product. |
| Is horribly complicated to install and configure. Requires Professional Services/Consulting days to do this. An upgrade is a big deal that must be planned, and performed by professionals. | Anyone can install it. Just click click click through the installation wizard. |
| Requires an “administrator” to perform regular maintenance and keep it running. | No maintenance required. |
| Because of the small install base, there are likely to be a lot of bugs related to different versions of the platform it is installed on. New versions have bugs for a long time as there are fewer users to find them and complain about them. | Works on the widest variety of operating system versions (although they are probably all still Windows). Fewer annoying bugs. |
| Usability is generally poor. Users of the software probably require training, even if they already know how to do the same thing with another similar product. | The software should be reletively intuitive to use. |
So, while I don’t think that the two columns are a particularly good fit for either Performance Center or LoadRunner, I will probably avoid using the word “enterprise” when I am trying to say that a product is suited for activities that are “business critical”, or that a product is “better than the cheap consumer version”.
very true
The two also have different license models. If you need remote access, from offsite, then you are pushed to Performance Center if you choose to maintain license compliance with the standard/non-custom license model. This is an oft overlooked item when contemplating securing off site resources for your loadrunner skills.
Almost every project I work on has offsite LR resources, as of late. In most cases, they do not use PC. They just RDP into the Controller box. This is including HP PSO projects. It may violate the EULA, but EVERYONE RDP’s to LR machines and HP doesn’t care.
There are some good points in that enterprise column that are applicable to PC IMO. The bottom line is that there are some major capabilities that PC has and if you want them, there’s only one way to get them. I think the install base would be much larger if the price was significantly reduced. It seems a lot of HP LoadRunner customers are migrating to PC just this year, so the install base has grown significantly as of late.
From my viewpoint the only major differences between Performance Center (v9.5) and Loadrunner are:
1) Performance Center allows you to swap licenses across Controllers, while LoadRunner does not. Frankly, this is the only thing I think PC has going for it. A more elegant solution would have been to develop a license server for LR.
2) Performance Center must be installed on at least 2 extra boxes (analysis and web server, and a DB server) if you plan to use it with any sort of user base. LoadRunner can be installed by anyone familiar with LoadRunner anywhere.
3) Performance Center puts a web interface on top of the LoadRunner interface (so you have another layer of potential failures to diagnose).
4) Performance Center can act as respository for all scenarios, scripts, and results. With LoadRunner, you’d have to use a file system (which is frankly easier to navigate, use, and manage)