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F E A T U R E

2003 Survivor's Guide to Network & Systems Management

December 15, 2002
By Bruce Boardman

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Quality of Experience

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Quality of Experience
	Standards Freeze
	Correlating the Kitchen Sink
	Companies to Watch
	Down But Not Out
	Web Links

QoE may be next year's buzz-a-rama winner: Each management vendor has a story to tell because it knows that if the end user isn't happy, neither is IT. No matter how many bytes, threads, cycles or transactions get processed and transmitted, in the end, it's all about how the customer or user experiences the business.

This isn't a new idea, of course, but vendors are just beginning to have insight into what makes the end user's experience good ... or bad. These companies also know that they can't expect huge capital outlays or time-consuming implementations, so prices start around $50,000, and many products begin to diagnose and solve performance problems within an hour of installation.

One of the strongest developments here is real-time click-stream analysis. Services from Keynote Systems and Fireclick gather transaction patterns as they happen, showing in real time how customers and end users are interacting with the business application.

Keynote uses this data to build traffic perspectives. In a controlled setting, a site's transactions and design may work, but when hit from all sides in an unpredictable manner, the end-user experience may be unacceptable. In the real world, customers don't always progress down transaction paths as designed. They react to site design, advertising and response time, taking unpredictable paths and abandoning shopping carts seemingly on a whim.

Keynote's click-stream analysis captures a site's actual traffic in real time and analyzes it. This could also be an excellent source of transaction data for input into a load tester. After all, what's more real world than a real load?

Fireclick is driving Web revenue models toward CPA (cost per acquisition). Web advertising was once charged at a cost per 1,000, or CPM, rate, and now it's morphed to CPC, or cost per click, providing revenue only when an ad is actually clicked. Fireclick is tracking advertising campaigns in this way, but CPA is the next step. Fireclick's Netflame real-time click-stream analysis can account for the paths that culminate in an acquisition, such as a purchase.

The realm of Internet advertising and search-engine keyword purchasing is just now adapting to the CPC method, but it won't be long until real-time analysis will drive a much tighter coupling between advertising rates, Web design and purchases. After all, the ultimate user experience is one where customers get what they want, and your mission is to give it to them by guiding your enterprise's investments in Web, application, database, server, storage and network technologies.

A PBNM Sandwich, MoM

In the enterprise the idea of buying software to configure multivendor networks seems like a good idea, but it's expensive. As vendors will point out, expensive is relative to total configuration and change management outlays, but these suites do cost more than simply buying more LAN bandwidth. Although it is true that configuration software can pay for itself in very large networks, QoS isn't going to make the case on the LAN. It's cheaper to buy bandwidth. So the argument that cited QoS options as a driver and opened the way to provider networks in the late 1990s hasn't made much headway in the enterprise.

In the late '90s it looked like PBNM (policy-based network management) was going to take off as well, but the aforementioned multivendor difficulties, stagnating standards and the over-capacity implosion of service providers--policy management vendors' largest potential customers--dimmed these prospects. Still, a couple of interesting developments offer a glimmer of hope for those seeking help in managing configurations.

Entrenched policy-management vendors Orchestream, Dorado Software and Solsoft have been joined by newcomers Intelliden Corp., Tripwire, Goldwire, Ponte Communications and AlterPoint. The collapse of the service-provider market has not been the death knell to this space one might have thought.