'Net Features : compuware

The High Cost of Low Website Performance

Linc Wonham — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:30:00 GMT

With technological progress also come greater expectations from users, and a new survey reveals that today’s consumers are frustrated by poor website performance and have even less tolerance for it than ever before.

While almost 90 percent of consumers believe it is important for websites to work well during peak traffic times, websites are not meeting their expectations, according to the Compuware survey. As a result, consumers have less patience and will take negative action faster when they experience poor website performance.

The survey, illustrated in this infographic, found that 37 percent of consumers find website performance issues unacceptable compared to 29 percent in 2009. Other key findings as to the business impact that poor performance plays include the following:

•      75 percent of those who experienced website issues have gone to a competitive site, and almost 30 percent go to a competitor’s site immediately.
•      86 percent of online consumers are less likely to return to a company’s website after a poor online experience.
•      43 percent of online consumers had a less positive perception of the company, and 33 percent told others about it after a poor online experience.

“Peak web traffic means increased revenue opportunity, and for most businesses peak periods are precisely when they spend the most on promotions and campaigns to drive visitors to their sites and convert the sale,” says Steve Tack, CTO of Compuware APM.

“However, peak traffic also means increased risk for degraded Web performance and, consequently, lost business. The overall message from consumers is clear — they want better online experiences and are willing to take action like going to a competitor’s site when they experience poor website performance during peak traffic times.”

Optimize Web, Mobile and Cloud Apps with Compuware

Linc Wonham — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:30:00 GMT

As organizations become increasingly dependent on business-critical applications, IT complexity has simultaneously exploded. Mobility, cloud, virtualization, Web 2.0, service-oriented architecture and browser diversity have all made achieving performance, availability and end-user experience goals a challenge.

Compuware’s latest release of the Gomez platform strives to address these challenges by expanding performance visibility and deeper analytics across the entire application delivery chain to find and fix problems that originate inside or outside of the data center. The Gomez platform is a leading solution for optimizing the performance of Web, non-Web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications. Gomez aims to provide a unified view from a user’s browser or mobile device, across the Internet or a corporate WAN, in the cloud to inside the data center, eliminating all of the blind spots.

New features in the November platform release include the following:

Mobile Real-User Monitoring (RUM) Conversion Analytics: Enables organizations to understand the relationship between performance and customer conversions for native mobile applications.

Integration With Google Mobile Page Speed: The Gomez Mobile Readiness scorecard now includes scores and recommendations for performance improvements from Google Mobile Page Speed, allowing organizations to assess and optimize the performance of their mobile applications.

Adaptive Streaming Support: Supports Adobe Flash Dynamic Streaming and Microsoft Silverlight Smooth Streaming. Measures characteristics such as the number of times the bitrate changes, the absolute time spent at each bitrate and the percentage of time spent at each bitrate.

Browser RUM User Satisfaction Map: Allows visualization of end-user satisfaction. Organizations can drill down to isolate performance problems by geography to better understand the quality of their real users’ experience by geographic region, page, browser, device, operating system and more.

SAP Application Analysis: Delivers detailed analysis of both thick-client (R/3) and Web-based (NetWeaver) instances of SAP applications, enabling proactive troubleshooting and optimization of revenue-impacting business operations.

Synthetic Monitoring Integration with Code-Level Analysis: Accelerates problem root-cause analysis by integrating Gomez’s synthetic monitoring platform with dynaTrace’s deep application visibility and diagnostics.

360-degree Web Load Testing: Allows testing Web, mobile and cloud applications from the customer’s point of view and resolves problems across the entire application delivery chain, accelerating time-to-market by quickly identifying user-experience performance problems and isolating the root cause down to the line of code.

Most Mobile Sites and Apps Lagging in Performance

Linc Wonham — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 02:00:00 GMT

The findings of a new survey show that consumers’ expectations for mobile and application performance are not being met.

Today’s mobile users demand exceptional Web experiences and highly satisfying, convenient, on-the-go mobile site speeds regardless of their mode of access, according to a study from technology performance company Compuware Corporation. The independent survey of more than 4,000 mobile users worldwide was conducted to understand consumers’ mobile Web and application expectations and experiences.

Key findings include the following:

• Mobile users’ expectations for mobile website speed continue to increase. Seventy-one percent of global mobile Web users expect websites to load as quickly, almost as quickly or faster on their mobile phones compared to the computers they use at home – up from 58 percent in 2009. However, almost half (46 percent) said websites load more slowly on their phones.

• Nearly 60 percent of Web users say they expect a website to load on their mobile phone in three seconds or less, and 74 percent are only willing to wait five seconds or less for a single Web page to load before leaving the site. Fifty percent are only willing to wait five seconds or less for an application to load before exiting.

• Fifty-seven percent of global mobile Web users had a problem accessing a website in the past year, and 47 percent had a problem accessing an app on their phone. More than 80 percent of mobile Web users would access websites more often from their phones if the experiences were faster and more reliable.

• Mobile users do not have much patience for retrying a website or application that is not functioning initially – a third will go to a competitor’s site instead. Eight out of ten mobile Web users are only willing to retry a website or application two times or less if it does not work initially.

• A bad experience on a mobile website leaves mobile Web users much less likely to return to, or recommend, a particular website. Nearly half of mobile Web users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone, and 57 percent are unlikely to recommend the site.

“We conducted this study as a follow on to our 2009 study that showed mobile users had high expectations, but the majority experienced poor mobile performance,” says Steve Tack, CTO of Compuware APM. “Almost two years later, user expectations for mobile continue to increase, but companies are still not meeting mobile users’ needs for fast and reliable experiences.

“Today, 77 percent of top companies across multiple verticals have mobile page load times of five seconds or more, while mobile users are only willing to wait five seconds or less for a Web page to load before leaving the site. Poor performance is preventing many companies from taking advantage of the opportunities being provided by increased mobile access.”

Compuware, Gomez Introduce New APM Solution

Linc Wonham — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Compuware Corporation has announced a new release of its integrated application performance management (APM) solution called the Compuware Gomez platform.

The new release introduces solutions that aim to help customers increase revenues, profitability and brand equity by optimizing mobile and Web application performance across the entire application delivery chain – from data centers through the cloud, to the edge of the Internet.

This is the second consecutive release Compuware has delivered for its entire integrated APM product set. It is the first release in which all of the Compuware APM products have been rebranded under a single product brand – Gomez – as announced separately. The update includes new functionality in both Compuware’s on-premises APM products (formerly called Vantage) and its software-as-a-service (SaaS) APM products, now all operating under the Gomez product brand name.

New features and capabilities in the Gomez Spring 2011 Platform Release include the following:

• Gomez Mobile Real-User Monitoring: The industry’s first mobile real-user monitoring solution that enables organizations to understand the actual performance end users are experiencing when using native mobile applications or accessing websites from mobile devices. Gomez Mobile Real-User Monitoring provides detailed performance analytics not available in any other monitoring solution. It works for native mobile applications and browsers across any mobile device, operating system or carrier.

• New Gomez Mobile Readiness Assessment: Provides an automatic assessment of the readiness of a website for mobile visitors by scoring the site against a set of standards and suggesting areas of improvement. This allows organizations to rate their mobile application’s capability to run across devices and browsers.

• Gomez Browser Real-User Monitoring: Measures the business impact of poor performance on Web conversions by correlating Web performance with abandonment along each step of a Web transaction. For every step, Gomez Browser Real-User Monitoring measures the number of users who have a satisfying, tolerating or frustrating experience. This aids Web teams in assessing if performance is helping or hurting their Web conversions, which directly impacts their online revenues.

• Integration With Google Page Speed: The first and only integration with Google Page Speed enables organizations to leverage Google technology to automatically assesses web performance against a set of rules, providing a specific score and recommendations for improvement. This allows organizations to optimize their Web pages based on industry-best practices.

• Internet Health Map with Last Mile Data: This free offering from Compuware uses a “collective intelligence” approach to indicate the operational health of the Internet to help organizations determine if a performance problem is specific to them or shared by other users. By comparing the results of the millions of tests that run on the Gomez global performance network every day to a rolling baseline of data for the same weekday and time, the Gomez Internet Health Map detects aberrations that are indicative of a general Internet performance issue at specific geographic locations. Because Compuware has the only testing network with 150,000+ real computers that operate at the “edge of the Internet” running behind local ISPs, the data from this “Last Mile” provides the most accurate insight into the true performance conditions experienced by real users.

• New High-volume Load-testing Agent: In addition to current real-world load generation from browsers and mobile devices, Gomez Web Load Testing now offers a highly scalable HTTP load agent that generates load from the cloud. The new agent enables self-service Web load testing up to millions of page views per hour and can be run in conjunction with the Gomez Last Mile for unprecedented accuracy in user-experience measurement.

• Updated Products for the Data Center: Enhancements to Gomez Business Service Manager (formerly called Vantage Service Manager), Gomez Real-User Monitoring – Data Center (formerly called Vantage Real-User Monitoring), and Gomez Java and .NET Monitoring (formerly called Vantage for Java and NET Monitoring) deliver expanded depth and breadth of visibility in data center performance monitoring.

• New Support for Cisco Unified Compute Server: Compuware has certified and optimized its on-premises software to integrate with and run on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). Compuware has a strategic technology integration agreement with Cisco and will be the OEM and authorized manufacturer to sell and recommend Cisco UCS to run all on-premises Gomez APM solutions.

For more details on all of the new enhancements, visit the Gomez Spring 2011 Platform Release Page.