Imagine a store with automatic doors that won't open, aisles so jammed you can't see the shelves, cash registers that don't work and clerks that direct you to the wrong location. That business wouldn't survive long on Main Street.
Like their brick-and-mortar counterparts, online merchants and suppliers are discovering that they can't sustain virtual businesses fraught with major outages, slow performance, content errors and broken transactions. The ad dollars spent on e-commerce may have gone up 1,400 percent last year, but poor performance is a big reason visitor-to-customer conversion rates remain flat. What's needed is operational discipline.
While software products have traditionally filled that need, this year marks a subscription-service revolution. New services, designed to monitor, diagnose and manage Web site performance and usability, are emerging almost weekly. Their special appeal is tied to many factors: new and understaffed e-commerce ventures; users who want to test services as a prelude to buying products; and managers who'd rather not gamble on volatile, unstandardized performance products. In addition, there are inherent economies in going to a service provider to measure performance across a global Internet.
Even as these new services emerge, they're morphing and partnering to include new management categories and metrics. Ultimately, this wild river of e-metrics will consolidate; within the year, some will begin to feed into more traditional management systems, such as those offered by BMC Software, Computer Associates International, Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp.
For now, though, we can roughly categorize some of the standout providers by the services for which they are most well-known:
Network-performance monitoring. A number of vendors, including Freshwater Software, I/Pro, Keynote Systems, Service Metrics and WebPartner, deploy measurement computers (agents) across the Internet to identify choke points. (See "Service Metrics and Keynote Step Ahead," page 54.) These services primarily help site managers reposition content on the Web or work with ISPs to ensure that service-level guarantees are met.
Transaction monitoring. Evity, Mercury Interactive Corp., Optimal Networks Corp. and other companies monitor the speed and availability of the components of an Internet transaction by generating synthetic traffic to the site, avoiding the need to install site-monitoring software.
Human-response monitoring. Customer Insites and WebCriteria, among others, rely on automated "bots" or other technology to examine human factors in site performance, such as the visitor perception that a site has stopped responding when one of the site's pages takes significantly longer to load than others.
Software- and live-visitor-based monitoring. Companies, such as Vividence Corp., demographically select volunteers and then electronically track these human visitors to sites using a combination of questions and site heuristics to assess site performance, errors and ease of use.
Although analysts estimate that fewer than 5 percent of Internet sites use any of these monitoring and management services today, more than 20 percent are expected to do so by year's end. The services that prevail in the coming coalescence will be those that make it easy for IT to dive to the root cause of problems and provide advance warning. Interfaces to existing management systems will become increasingly important. Companies that offer software as well as services also may have an edge because larger sites may want to do their own site management while using a consistent service that furnishes information about extranet supplier sites or Internet-specific metrics (see "Site Monitoring: The Next Wave,".)
REPORTS
Analyize In-Line NAC strategies and products.
ANALYTICS Plan and design your enterprise blade server deployments
2009 IT Salary Survey: Meager Raises, Solid Prospects
Though raises are notably smaller than a year ago, and job security’s shrinking, IT careers are looking safer than many others in this economic downturn. Get all the findings in InformationWeek's 2009 IT Salary Survey. Available FREE for a limited time.
REPORTS
ANALYTICS
Follow 
