InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

October 9, 2000

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BMC Integrates Site-Monitoring Tool

Siteangel monitors a Web site from outside the firewall, then measures results

By George V. Hulme

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n the race to drive customer service, many companies are running into a roadblock: tracking service levels on both sides of the corporate firewall. IT managers need to understand the performance their customers' experience, as well as the effect back-office systems have on Web-site operations.

Philip Aarness, director of Internet reporting for American Express Co. in New York, says the need for reporting integration between front-and back-end systems is enormous. "I want my system reporting to be focused on the customer experience," he says. "Yet when a customer-service issue is identified, a lack of integration between back-end and front-end monitoring systems creates confusion and delays around what's actually broken--and what the fix should be."

BMC Software Inc. feels Aarness' pain. The vendor has integrated Internet management software from Evity Inc., which BMC acquired in May, with BMC's Patrol 2000 management tools. Evity's flagship product, SiteAngel, monitors a Web site from outside a company's firewall by simulating what customers do at the Web site and then measuring the performance results.

Aarness likes SiteAngel because it's easy to set up and gives him a quick view of the status of key customer touch points. "If a problem is detected, notifications are sent out via pager or E-mail so we can respond," he says.

Few management applications take BMC's approach of simulating the actual customer experience, says Steve Foote, president of IT research firm Enswers .com. According to Foote, most other management apps attempt to view the customer experience by placing agents on the user's system. Not only is installing the agents a logistical nightmare, but some people don't want companies to collect data about their online activities from their PC.

What's more, by simulating the customer experience, SiteAngel lets companies understand what back-end systems are affected by a customer's request, and, more important, it reports activity with information on the troublemaking transaction, Foote says. "That's the kind of information IT managers need. It's much more valuable than knowing that some type of request is slow without understanding the context."

Pricing for the integrated software starts at $4,000.

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