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September 20, 1999

Push For Performance

Vendors are rushing to fill the need for tools that let businesses assess Web-site performance and understand the behavior of their online customers

By Beth Bacheldor

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he growing emphasis on building high-performance, bulletproof, customer-friendly Web sites has revealed the soft underbelly of E-commerce: a lack of tools for managing it all. Scalable servers make it possible for businesses to build sites that support thousands of visitors, but a dearth of sophisticated add-on tools has made it difficult to assess system performance and understand-and react to-customer behavior. New products could make a big difference.

The products are coming from large, established system suppliers and smaller specialists with E-commerce know-how. Hewlett-Packard last week disclosed plans to make its quality-of-service software, WebQoS, a standard feature in an enhanced version of the company's HP-UX 11 Unix operating system, to be available next month. WebQoS monitors Internet traffic congestion, Web-site usage, and server latency, making it possible for site administrators to ensure acceptable site performance for priority customers. Earlier this month, HP introduced a new application for its OpenView management platform, OpenView Observer, which captures a variety of Web-site data, such as how long a customer spends in an online order-entry application.

Microsoft and Cisco Systems last week demonstrated their own quality-of-service offering, based on Windows 2000 and Cisco's Catalyst switches for policy-based networking. The technology, for example, will support SAP's mySAP.com portal, making it possible for system administrators to define and enforce policies on extranets for better performance. The offering will be supported by all three vendors by year's end. Microsoft is also building data mining algorithms into the next release of its Site Server E-commerce platform.

Then there are products such as Net.genesis Corp.'s CartSmarts, to be introduced this week, designed to help companies understand consumers' online shopping patterns, and NextPoint's just-released S3e Commerce Manager, for measuring Web-site performance from the perspective of an online user. "Understanding how your customers feel is the ultimate driver of all online activity," says Gary Bishop, VP of IT with the American Heart Association in Dallas, which uses the Web for fund raising. "We're acquiring new measurement tools all the time."

Emerging Market
The market for Web-site analysis and performance-measurement tools is small, but growing rapidly. Preliminary estimates from Dataquest are that the market will top $1 billion by 2003. Says Eric Schmitt, an analyst with Forrester Research, "As Internet budgets are starting to go through the roof, executives are going to demand accountability and will need these kinds of tools."

Tribune Co. is using Net.genesis' net.analysis software to assess how well its sites are serving customers. "These products can help us understand at what point a customer is ready to buy, and to better understand why they would buy with us or go somewhere else," says Troy Glick, Webmaster for two of Tribune's sites, orlandosentinel.com, an online newspaper, and go2orlando. com, a travel site. The tools can also help with return on investment. "If we build a new Web product or enhance an existing one," says Glick, "we can measure the effectiveness of the changes."

Net.genesis' CartSmarts software collects data by searching the log files of Web servers and gleaning information from browser cookies. It can create reports on how many visitors browsed a site, who shopped, who left, and more. "Companies are putting a lot more money into their Web sites," says Anne Estabrook, VP of marketing at Net.genesis. "They have a much greater interest in understanding what's happening on the Web."

Within the next two months, Net.genesis competitor Andromedia Inc. will roll out a new version of its own usage-analysis software, Aria, which will also provide more details about customers' buying behavior.

Other new products are geared more toward performance. NextPoint's S3e Commerce Manager uses agents to mimic visitors' actions, such as downloads, searches, or purchases. Technicolor, the media production company, is using the software to monitor its www.techni color.com site. This fall, Technicolor will launch an extranet that will also use the NextPoint software. Bob Brent, manager of network services at Technicolor, in Camarillo, Calif., says he wants to know about any dips in Web-site performance before customers start complaining. Once the phones start ringing, he says, "that's too late. You can create a lot of negative publicity for your Web site in a big hurry."

Technicolor's extranet will let customers access the company's manufacturing and distribution application. The NextPoint software agents will make it possible to track transactions and locate bottlenecks. "I can find out if a problem was with the Web server on my customer's site," says Brent. "Or was it coming into my site that was slow? Or was the transaction going out to the credit-card company's site slow? NextPoint helps point me in the right direction."

Better Site Performance
Site-performance services are also getting better. Keynote Systems Inc., which already offers a service that repeatedly hits a company's Web site from 70 different locations to gauge performance, will soon be able to measure performance when traffic enters a site over dial-up services. And Service Metrics Inc. last week introduced a new version of a performance-measurement service, SM-Web 2.0, that monitors Web sites up to 15 times per hour and turns out near-real-time reports on site performance. The vendor also unveiled software, SM-SourceTracker, which monitors the performance of ad banners, logon screens, and other Web content.

Priceline.com recently began using Service Metrics to monitor the performance of its auction site and to compare it with competing sites. "What I'm concerned with is that the infrastructure is responsive and stays up," says Ron Rose, Priceline.com's CIO. "These kinds of tools are indispensible for that."

In the next few weeks, Priceline.com plans to begin using Service Metrics to monitor specific parts of its Web site to measure, for example, how long it takes a customer to make an offer on an airline ticket. "It's a personal quest of mine to make sure our customers have a pleasant experience," says Rose. "Pleasant means fast."

SmarterKids.com, a site that sells books, software, and other educational materials, recently improved a search application tied to a banner ad it had running on Microsoft's Encarta site. Discoveries made with Net. genesis' software prompted the action. "We were noticing that about 95% of our visitors coming from Encarta looked at one page and left," says Al Noyes, senior VP of marketing and sales for the online retailer.

The problem: Much of the traffic coming in from Encarta's home page was generated by a search tool tied to its banner ad, but once on the SmarterKids.com site, queries for popular toys such as Barbie or Pokemon resulted in a "Sorry, no results were found" message-and a short-lived visit. As a result, SmarterKids.com redesigned the app to automatically list some of the products it sells. Over the last month, the ad's performance on Encarta has "improved dramatically," Noyes says. Web-site analysis, he adds, helps SmarterKids.com "understand where customers come from, what they do here, and why they leave."

AskJeeves Inc., a provider of search technology and operator of the AskJeeves.com Web site, recently saved more than $100,000 using Keynote's performance-measurement services, says Richard Hartman, manager of MIS and site operations. AskJeeves was trying to decide whether it should add another server for its site on the East Coast, which would have cost at least $150,000. But before it did, AskJeeves spent $10,000 with Keynote to see if the move would improve performance. "We found our site would gain less than 7% in speed," says Hartman. "The overall improvement in user experience would be negligible."

To better understand its online customers, AskJeeves is installing software from MarketWave Corp. As a sign of the increasing market activity, MarketWave and competitor Accrue Software Inc. last week disclosed their intention to merge. The companies' products, which are similar in functionality, will support both Unix and Windows NT.

Other IT managers agree with Hartman that online businesses need to leverage both customer-analysis and performance-analysis tools if they're to stay on top of the rapidly changing demands of E-commerce. "The bar is moving higher and higher in terms of customer expectations," says Kris Oliver, VP of airline marketing and development with Sabre Inc., which owns the Travelocity travel site. "What was innovative six months ago is now expected, the norm."

It's vital that businesses do a better job of integrating site-performance efforts with online sales and marketing, says Forrester analyst Matthew Nordan. "Let's say that you have some type of real-time analysis tool, and it's showing a disproportionate spike in site exits. If that number reaches a threshold, what happens? At most sites, nothing," says Nordan. "What you would like to happen is that a marketing tool could fire off some kind of alert that says that too many people are exiting at once."

Theoretically, that alert could trigger a systems-management tool to see if a process is hung up-and if so, fix it. This kind of collaboration between applications, networks, and systems exists in other areas of IT, but it's not as well-developed for Web-site environments. Analysts expect that to change and point to last week's initiatives by HP, Microsoft, Cisco, and SAP as evidence of needed integration.

All of these tools and services, regardless of how they go about it, are designed to help companies prevent what could be a major E-business faux pas. "We want our customers to have a positive experience on our Web site because it reflects on us as a company," says Technicolor's Brent. "If there's a lot of clunkiness to the site, then the customers will wonder if they're playing with the right company."

With additional reporting by Gregory Dalton, Martin J. Garvey, Tischelle George, and Clinton Wilder

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