Companies That Rely On Advanced Application Acceleration Tools Deliver Best-In-Class Web Application Performance

Vancouver, B.C. (Vocus) December 17, 2008

Organizations that lack capabilities for managing every aspect of web application performance negatively impact several aspects of their business – from their ability to manage relationships with customers and prospects, to their ability to attract top talent or improve employee productivity, according to a new benchmark report by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks company (NYSE: HHS). The report is sponsored in part by Strangeloop Networks, a leading provider of solutions that accelerate dynamic web applications developed with Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework.

Entitled “The Performance of Web Applications,” the report surveyed over 160 organizations between October and November 2008 and used key performance criteria to distinguish Best-In-Class companies from Industry Average companies and Laggards. The report found that the increase in dynamic Web 2.0 applications is posing new web performance challenges to companies across the board, and that Best-In-Class organizations are adjusting their strategies, and adopting advanced application acceleration tools in order to address these challenges effectively. More than half of the respondents reported the use of Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework for their business critical applications, indicating its continued popularity and effectiveness in the marketplace.

“Because of the growing complexities of Web 2.0 applications, companies can no longer assume that just one or two key capabilities will fix their performance problems,” said Bojan Simic, research analyst at Aberdeen. “If they try to address all of their pain points with the traditional technologies they’ve been using for the last five years, their applications simply won’t perform effectively, ultimately leading to dissatisfied customers and loss of business. On the other side of the coin, to ensure Best-In-Class web application performance, enterprises of all sizes should deploy intelligent web acceleration tools.”

Web 2.0 applications give rise to new performance challenges

The report reveals that dynamic content and Java scripts are the top two characteristics of web applications currently being deployed, with more than half of the respondents reporting “significant dynamic content” and “java scripts in most pages.” In addition, findings show that organizations are losing some of the control they previously had over the performance of these applications due to new underlying technologies and usage patterns that are becoming more difficult to predict. Together these issues are giving rise to a new generation of performance challenges.

Improving end-user satisfaction is top goal, yet remains the biggest challenge

Aberdeen’s research shows that the top two reasons for adopting these types of technology solutions are to improve customer (end-user) satisfaction and improve employee productivity. Yet respondents’ top two performance challenges are directly related to the end user, including: 1) the inability to prevent performance problems before their end users are impacted, and 2) the inability to measure application performance from an end-user perspective. Additionally, end-user’s expectations for highly performing applications continue to rise; what appeared to be minor performance issues in the past are now becoming serious business problems that can impact revenue generation, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation. Not surprisingly, the findings also show that organizations are increasingly realizing that the communication between application development and the systems and network is important; citing faster trouble shooting of performance issues and eliminating performance issues before applications are rolled out into production.

Multiple application delivery functionalities: key to performance improvements

In order to adjust their performance management initiatives with the types of applications described above, and to address the growing importance of the end-user’s experience, Aberdeen recommends that Best-In-Class companies deploy tools for caching web traffic, as well as deploy intelligent agents that can adjust caching decisions based on traffic load. Best-In-Class companies who deployed solutions for intelligent caching are, approximately:

Companies That Rely On Advanced Application Acceleration Tools Deliver Best-In-Class Web Application Performance