SolarWinds Survey Finds Nearly Half of North American Organizations Have Provided Negative Digital Experiences to Customers; Most Lack Digital Experience Monitoring Capabilities

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 15, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced the findings of its Digital Experience Monitoring Survey*. Chief among the findings are that North American organizations are experiencing digital issues that negatively affect their businesses at an alarming rate, yet they have been slow to adopt digital experience monitoring (DEM) tools. This slow adoption relates to both a lack of understanding of the benefits as well as budget constraints. However, the survey also found DEM brings proven benefits to both IT departments and businesses on the whole alike.

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“We live in a highly digital world where companies can no longer take a passive approach to the digital experience of their customers—it’s an organization’s most important competitive advantage and makes all the difference between a good or bad customer experience,” said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president, products, SolarWinds. “These survey results demonstrate just how large of an impact DEM can have—among the organizations that reported a revenue increase, it has driven an estimated mean of 15 percent revenue increase. The problem is that only eight percent are currently leveraging DEM.”

To better enable customers to deliver the high-quality digital experience end-users expect, SolarWinds also announced updates to Pingdom^®, its leading DEM solution, including the all new filmstrip view and threshold alerting, as well as mobile application enhancements. These updates will help improve the digital experience by providing greater visibility to optimize how a website loads and more flexibility to alert sooner if a website is down.

“In today’s increasingly complex application environments, where users connect via a growing variety of devices and traverse a multitude of services within an app, quickly identifying when and where problems occur is key to business,” said Nancy Gohring, senior analyst, application and infrastructure performance at 451 Research. “Providers of traditional APM solutions that can offer products capable of monitoring and improving the digital experience will be well positioned to serve the needs of businesses that are increasingly focused on the user experience.” 

For a live view of global website outages, which demonstrates the need for greater DEM adoption, visit the Pingdom State of the Internet Live. This live broadcast of website outages and internet usage statics is collected by Pingdom from users across the world.

Survey Key Findings

1. Companies are suffering digital experience issues that negatively affect their businesses—they report a lack of visibility into customer experience and a need to monitor—at an alarming rate, yet they are slow to adopt monitoring tools.
    
   • 40 percent of the IT professionals surveyed reported negative customer-impacting digital experience issues or downtime within the past year
     • The most commonly experienced digital issues were:
       • Slow performance (51 percent)
       • End-users being the first to discover issues (44 percent)
       • Difficulty troubleshooting customer experience issues (41 percent)
       • Website and/or app downtime (34 percent)
   • More than 25 percent said they are usually the last to know when customers are experiencing an issue, with only 16 percent reporting they are usually the first to know when there is a digital experience issue
   • While 70 percent said their companies are either in development or early stage implementation of DEM, only eight percent of respondents said their companies are currently leveraging DEM, and just four percent said they’re “experts” on DEM
      
2. The slow adoption of DEM relates to both a lack of understanding of the benefits as well as budget constraints.
    
   • The top three DEM challenges are:
     • Budget constraints (50 percent)
     • Integration with existing systems (37 percent)
     • Lack of expertise with/understanding of DEM (34 percent) 
   • The majority (60 percent) consider their companies’ DEM budgets to be insufficient
      
3. However, DEM brings proven benefits to both IT departments and businesses on the whole alike.
    
   • Fifty-nine percent reported fewer support tickets, 44 percent reported improved brand image, and 33 percent reported better ability to retain customers
   • Furthermore, the top three corporate benefits reported were less time spent manually troubleshooting reported performance problems (70 percent), less budget and resources dedicated to firefighting (43 percent), and more time to focus on innovation (43 percent)
   • The three problems DEM has most often been able to solve are:
     • Website or web application page load speed (43 percent)
     • Website or web application downtime (43 percent)
     • Impacts on the end-user experience due to various devices, operating systems, and browsers (43 percent)
   • Among those who reported that DEM has driven increased revenue, a mean of 15.2 percent of revenue increase can be attributed to DEM
      
4. Business leaders seeking to improve visibility into and the performance of systems affecting digital experience should focus on technology.
    
   • The most important technology considerations in a DEM strategy are:
     • Website uptime monitoring (75 percent indicated this is “critical or very important”)
     • Server monitoring (74 percent indicated this is “critical or very important”)
     • Network monitoring (67 percent indicated this is “critical or very important”)
     • Application performance monitoring (64 percent indicated this is “critical or very important”)
   • The top two key factors driving interest in DEM are a lack of visibility or quantifiable customer experience metrics (48 percent) and the need to remain competitive through technology innovation that improves user experience (45 percent)

Pingdom Updates

Filmstrip View
With the new Filmstrip function, Pingdom users will be able to easily view the web page rendering using data from the Pingdom PageSpeed test, enabling even greater visibility of how website and web application changes impact the end-user experience. Filmstrip view is now available.

Threshold Alerting
With threshold alerting, users can select a time threshold after which their site would be considered down. This allows users to specify how long is too long when it comes to server response times for their website, giving them greater control over how their websites perform for visitors. Threshold alerting is now available.

Mobile Application Enhancements
With the latest updates to the Pingdom mobile applications for Google^® Android^® and Apple^® iOS^®, mobile device users will enjoy an updated design, more application customization, and other benefits. These mobile application enhancements for Android are now available, and the updates for iOS will become available in an upcoming release.

Latin America Probe Servers
Latin America is one of the fastest growing Internet markets in the world. Pingdom has added seven probe servers in Latin America so customers can check their website’s availability and performance from this growing region. Pingdom now has over 100 probe servers located across the globe. Latin America Probe Servers are now available.

“With more than one million accounts, Pingdom is the industry standard in the DEM arena, helping organizations make websites faster and more reliable with powerful, easy-to-use uptime and performance monitoring,” Pfister added. “With these updates, IT and marketing professionals are more empowered than ever to not only ensure websites and web applications are online, but also give their users a great digital experience; build positive brand image; and ultimately, drive more revenue.”

*Fielded between May and June 2017 in conjunction with Penton Research, the survey yielded responses from 244 IT professionals, including  179 IT professionals in North America. Full survey results available upon request.

Additional Resources

• Pingdom State of the Internet Live
• SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2017: Portrait of a Hybrid IT Organization
• Pingdom: Digital experience monitoring
• Pingdom Server Monitor: Server monitoring
• TraceView^™: Application performance monitoring
• Papertrail^™: Hosted log management
• Librato^®: Metrics monitoring and analytics

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About SolarWinds
SolarWinds provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide, from small businesses to Fortune 500^® enterprises, managed service providers (MSPs), government agencies, and educational institutions. We are committed to focusing exclusively on IT, MSP, and DevOps professionals, and strive to eliminate the complexity that our customers have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. Regardless of where the IT asset or user sits, SolarWinds delivers products that are easy to find, buy, use, maintain, and scale while providing the power to address key areas of the infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud. This focus and commitment to excellence in end-to-end hybrid IT performance management has established SolarWinds as the worldwide leader in both network management software and MSP solutions, and is driving similar growth across the full spectrum of IT management software. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our THWACK online community to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process. Learn more today at www.solarwinds.com.

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