Will Top Retailers' Web and Mobile Sites Perform Well for Users on Cyber Monday?
New Compuware Performance Index Reveals How Top U.S. Retailers' Web and Mobile
Sites are Performing – and Why
DETROIT--November 17, 2011--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, General Manager,
Compuware 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:
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. websites. Learn more at:
http://www.compuware.com.
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Press Contact
Jackie Volovich, Warner Communications, 978-526-1960
Lisa Robinson Schoeller, dynaTrace
software, A Division of Compuware, 781-768-4907
For Sales and Marketing Information
Compuware Corporation, One Campus Martius, Detroit, MI 48226, 800-521-9353,
http://www.compuware.com