DETROIT, Nov. 17, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq:CPWR), the technology performance company, today introduced the Compuware Performance Index, which provides a real-world view into how top U.S. retailers' web and mobile sites are performing and highlights how satisfied users may be with their online experience this holiday season. Compuware will announce which retailers performed best during the peak online shopping period of November 25 – 28 and why.
Cyber Monday 2011 is on target to be the single highest online shopping day in history. Retailers must be prepared for the challenges related to surging demand, particularly maintaining superior user experience and application response time. According to Forrester Research, online shoppers expect pages to load in less than two seconds, and 40 percent of shoppers will abandon a site if pages take more than three seconds to load.
"Last year online shoppers spent $1 billion on Cyber Monday in what was then the largest online purchase day in history," explained John Van Siclen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compuware's Application Performance Management (APM) Business Unit. "This is a time when milliseconds of delay can make the difference between a customer completing a transaction or abandoning the site to shop elsewhere. In short, web and mobile performance are critical business issues."
Compuware will use a combination of its Gomez Last Mile and dynaTrace technology to gain real-world insight into web and mobile performance. The Last Mile measures performance using 150,000 computers on real users' desktops and mobile devices at the "edge of the Internet," behind local ISPs, third-party and cloud providers, and mobile carriers. Compuware will use dynaTrace's unique ability to trace, capture and analyze all transactions from the user click, across all tiers, to the database and back, to determine why some retailers performed well and others did not.
The Compuware Performance Index is comprised of the following:
- Performance Satisfaction Index – measures how satisfied users are with web and mobile site performance using the Apdex methodology to estimate user satisfaction with performance
- Mobile Performance Pulse – measures how top U.S. retailers' mobile sites are performing compared to a typical non-peak period
- Website Performance Pulse – measures how top U.S. retailers' websites are performing compared to a typical non-peak period
Compuware is used by more online retailers than any other web monitoring solution, and many of the world's most recognized eCommerce firms drive billions of dollars in revenue through applications that are monitored and optimized by its Gomez and dynaTrace APM product lines. Based on its depth of experience, Compuware has outlined the major performance challenges that online retailers must be prepared to meet on Cyber Monday and throughout the 2011 holiday shopping season:
Scale or fail
Websites must scale to meet demand and remain stable under load. Insight into performance must be in real time, and organizations must be able to identify issues immediately to resolve them before sales are lost. According to Forrester Research, online shoppers expect pages to load in less than two seconds, and 40 percent of them will abandon a site if pages take more than three seconds to render. This means that even a slight disruption or slowdown can translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Understand each customer
It is no longer enough to monitor application performance; today's online retailers must be able to view and understand the user experience from the user's perspective. Without this insight it is impossible to ensure that customers are having smooth shopping experiences from browsing to final check out and delivery of products.
Organizations must have the ability to understand and manage actual user experience from a browser-click, through the web- and application-tiers, to the database, and back—for all users, all transactions 24x7. After all, if the customer is king, a system that ignores the customer's experience is ignoring a critical need.
Application performance matters
Retail sites are more intricate than ever before. Customer- and partner-facing applications are exploding, applications are becoming increasingly complex, infrastructures are being virtualized and endpoint diversity, including smart phones and tablets, is growing. Online retailers must have continuous insight into third-party services and business transactions; they need more than just uptime stats and page views from which to make informed decisions.
Business owners need to know if all application components are meeting service level targets for each customer, how performance is affecting revenue, and how marketing campaigns are affecting usage. They should have a transaction-centric approach with precision visibility down to code-level of each business-critical transaction in order to spot the true root-cause of issues and resolve them immediately. After all, it only takes one application failure to destroy overall performance.
If something can go wrong, it will
Regardless of how well prepared online retailers think they are, the fact is that stuff happens. Application errors, database performance, incomplete transactions, slowness in third-party services, bottlenecks in garbage collection, slow memory leaks, javascript errors – and many more issues – all stand ready to disrupt 2011 holiday sales. The only true defense against these threats is a good offense. Organizations must monitor all transactions in real time, end-to-end, from user click, across all tiers, to the database of record and back. Exact, "deep atomic level" detail, with the ability to identify the root-cause of issues immediately, is the only way to truly be prepared.
About dynaTrace software
dynaTrace, a division of Compuware, is the leader in a new generation of application performance management (APM). With its patented PurePath Technology, the company offers the only continuous APM system on the market, transforming how applications are monitored, managed and optimized. Hundreds of companies including Zappos, Hiscox, Macy's, BBVA, BonTon, Saint Gobain, Sentry and Thomson Reuters rely on dynaTrace to drive better business results by optimizing performance, accelerating release cycles, reducing application management costs, and bringing business and IT closer together. Visit dynaTrace online at http://www.dynatrace.com.
The Gomez platform is the industry's leading solution for optimizing the performance of web, non-web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications. Driven by end-user experience, Gomez provides a unified view across the entire application delivery chain, from a user's browser or mobile device, across the Internet or a corporate WAN, in the cloud, to inside the data center, eliminating blind spots from the First Mile to the Last Mile.
Compuware Corporation
Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, provides software, experts and best practices to ensure technology works well and delivers value. Compuware solutions make the world's most important technologies perform at their best for leading organizations worldwide, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited U.S. web sites. Learn more at: http://www.compuware.com.
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