Poor performance can now degrade your business in an even more real and meaningful way.  Recent changes by Google will allow site performance to affect whether traffic is driven to your site.  This places a new urgency on the ability to accurately measure performance in terms of the end user.

Recently, the Mashable blog reported on a decision by Google to add performance as another deciding factor in how they rank their search results.  This marks a significant milestone in which performance will affect your site’s ability to attract visitors.  Essentially, the faster sites will receive more attention.  By taking this action, Google hopes to shine a spotlight on performance and drive better overall development practices.  I have no doubt that this is a direct result of Steve Souders‘ move to Google from Yahoo, where he had been busy leading the YUI best practices effort that produced YSlow.  Since that time, Google has become much more of an advocate for web performance.  Here’s a direct quote from their blog that sums up their current perspective:

“We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed … not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.”

Essentially, Google has now made performance an important factor in driving business to your site.  At the same time, performance is one of the hardest things to accurately and properly measure for web-based traffic.  Google suggests a number of very good tools, most of which run inside your browser.  These tools look at performance in terms of the end user, which is now a recognized best practice.  However, they only measure the performance of your site while you are actively browsing it.  They won’t tell you anything about how your site performs for others or how it performs during the other 99% of the time when you are not personally measuring it with your browser.  Synthetic testing suffers from the same drawbacks.

More importantly, these approaches miss the elusive problems that affect specific people or that occur at specific times.  Nor will they find the problems that only occur under specific circumstances.  The fact is, these elusive issues are the most common.  They are the ones that plague every web site administrator because they are hard to find and nearly impossible to reproduce.  They eat up days of investigation time and are the biggest destroyer of public confidence in your site.  To find these problems, you need to be watching ALL traffic on your site every second of every day.  Moreover, you must do so while maintaining the end user perspective.

There are very few solutions out there that can do this effectively.  Consequently, we are justifiably proud of our TrueSight product line and it’s ability to tackle this very difficult problem.  Once installed in your data center behind your firewall, TrueSight is able to monitor all traffic from your load balancer all the way back to your database and 3rd party tiers – from web request right down to code, SOA and SQL calls.  We auto-discover new applications and web servers as they are deployed without any need for additional configuration.  Moreover, our monitoring solution continues to perform its duties, even as you gradually virtualize your infrastructure or integrate back-end cloud services.

In fact, using a unique ground-breaking integration, we can provide full visibility of any deployments using Akamai’s Application Delivery Assurance services, like acceleration or caching.  Our unique relationship with Akamai has also recently led to the first co-developed solution that is being offered directly from Akamai for managing their services.

Furthermore, our technology is capable of providing accurate overall performance measurements for mashups or hybrid solutions.

If you have blind spots in your performance monitoring, you will not be protected from the negative consequences of this new trend.  If you lack insight on your end users’ actual experience on your site, you should seriously start planning to acquire it.

Gartner released their June 2008 version of their venerable “Magic Quadrant” ranking for E-Recruitment Software.

Six of the eight leaders are already Coradiant customers.

This is a clear indication that leaders in this burgeoning field are taking End-User Experience Management seriously.

Coradiant is consistently chosen by leaders in online HR and in a number of other industries whose business relies on web applications.

With Coradiant TrueSight, businesses know how they are treating every single one of their web visitors, whether they are a small business interfacing with a few high valued users or a large enterprise interacting with hundreds of individuals online every second.

Leaders in E-recruitment software and HR Software-as-a-Service businesses are all focused on providing a high-quality end user experience. And Coradiant is the overwhelming choice among the leaders for End User Experience Management. Gartner ranked leading vendors on the completeness of their model and on their ability to execute.

Copies of Gartner’s E-Recruitment Software Magic Quadrant report are available from Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com).   

After a whirlwind of activity in late 2006, I get a brief respite to reflect on things before hitting the road again next week. We had a great 2006, far beyond our wildest expectations, and it feels like we’re spending less and less time explaining what Real User Monitoring is and more time understanding how it’s going to change the way a particular industry does business.

One example of this came across in the past month. While we’ve got customers in all kinds of industry verticals, from healthcare to finance to entertainment to e-commerce, one of the places we’re particularly strong is in the Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) sector. This class of web applications offer software functionality with a hosted model. SaaS heavyweights include companies like Salesforce.com (salesforce automation and CRM), RightNow Technologies (CRM and customer support), Taleo (Human resources and recruiting), and ADP (HR and payroll.)

Most of these companies collect revenue through “seats” — that is, the number of users subscribed to the application. It’s a lot harder to regulate account abuse in a SaaS model than it is with a software license. When I sell a copy of some software, I can include a license key and some form of online verification, which prevents sharing. And that license isn’t very portable: The overhead of uninstalling it on one machine and installing it on another is usually overwhelming. But as a SaaS vendor, I can’t enforce licensing in this manner when one of my main value propositions is that there’s nothing to install!

To make matters worse, another key advantage of SaaS is the portability and mobility of the application. Customers can use Salesforce.com from home, or work, or anyone else’s machine. So how does Salesforce know they’re not sharing user accounts?

It turns out that this is a major issue for many of our SaaS customers. Some real estate offices have a single account with a SaaS provider, but an entire office uses that account. Recruiters give out their password to people in other countries. Some salespeople adopt a “timesharing” approach to hosted applications. It’s astonishing how creative end-users can get when it comes to saving $40 or $50 a month!

As you might imagine, Real User Montioring is a great tool for detecting and proving account abuse. We’ve recently added all kinds of geographic lookup and service provider tracking capabilities to the latest release of TrueSight, and some of our recent customers — who initially came to us for incident detection and service level reporting — are using us for account fraud detection. It’s easy to win an argument with an end-user when you can prove that he apparently got to work in Texas, had lunch in Bangalore, and ended the day in France. And I’m not making that one up. Sounds like my travel schedule.

Of course, some of this stuff can be detected within the application itself — most SaaS tools won’t allow multiple logins from the same account. But few of the SaaS providers have properly instrumented this, much less tied it back to an account team who can then call the customer and sell them a few more account licenses. And with all of the sneaky tricks people play in order to circumvent additional licenses, the forensic information you get from Real User Monitoring is invaluable. For example:

• You might get several logins that look like they’re from the same IP — but have different X-Forwarded-For headers because they’re really different machines behind a proxy
• You might get different user-agents within a session as people switch browsers
• The TCP round-trip-time (a measure of delay across the Internet) may vary wildly, indicating different latencies behind a hop on the net

One of the best things about working with a bunch of smart customers is that they’re always pushing the envelope. In our case, Coradiant’s Session Networking technology — the stuff that powers our TrueSight boxes — has all sorts of interesting and creative uses we hadn’t thought of when we set out to make a latency monitoring appliance back in 2003. And we had no idea we were going to build an appliance when we started monitoring user experience on the sites we were operating as an MSP back in 2000.

The holiday seasons are always a time to reflect, and it’s been a fascinating few years discovering all of the unexpected ways this technology can be put to good use throughout the Internet world. Here’s to an equally fascinating 2007!