User Experience Monitoring moves into business management realm
24 February 2009 - Q010
Business executives without deep technical knowledge can now objectively, and continuously measure and monitor precisely how well – or badly – their Internet-based customer channel applications and services are performing, without having to decipher technically complex reports, or await this from their IT departments .
This follows the release by optimised network and application services and solutions company, Qualica Technologies, of an enhanced, business-friendly version of its popular User Experience Monitoring (UEM) solution.
“Business and IT generally approach the concept of network performance from different perspectives,” says Qualica CEO David Rogers. “For IT, a network and application system is performing well if it maintains high availability and low load. For business, the concern is that customers actually enjoy their online interactions with the company, and receive the correct service at an appropriate level commensurate with the brand and industry norms.
UEM also differs from the traditional approach in another important way as it virtually puts the UEM collectors in the same geographical locations as the users, allowing them to interact with the applications over differing telco and connectivity infrastructures just as end users do.
Traditionally, the system is monitored from the inside outwards, with the focus only on the software than runs on the WAN or LAN.
Rogers points out that businesses spend a lot of money setting up and maintaining IT infrastructure to make them more efficient and to interact better with customers.
However, it’s not unusual for one customer’s experience of a company’s website, email service and even the corporate network to vary considerable, from another customer who is online simultaneously. It could be good for some, poor for others. Or, it could be uniformly bad for everyone, or not as good as it should or could be.
The question is: how is the business to know in a continuous and objective manner what the customer is really experiencing from a true end to end perspective? And if the business doesn’t know, it can’t take steps to remedy the situation. Meanwhile customers could be so disgruntled with a slow website or tardy response to their emails that they switch to a competitor who, after all, is just a click away.
“That’s where UEM comes to the fore,” Rogers says. “UEM enables businesses to understand how their customers and employees experience the performance of the online services and applications they provide by continuously and objectively quantifying end-to-end performance and to proactively identify where sub-optimal performance is occurring.”
“In addition, UEM pinpoints precisely where problems are occurring which means the technical team can devote more targeted resources and time to resolving problems than discussing whether the problems are real or not” he explains.
However, UEM solutions generally tend to be extremely technical and complex, making it difficult for non-IT managers to fully interpret the data and reports produced.
The latest version of Qualica’s UEM offering has been designed to bridge that gap, by making it easy for non-IT users to slice and dice and compare technical data and obtain meaningful analyses of system performance.
“Managers can quickly see how their applications are performing and where bottlenecks are occurring. They can see exactly how users – customers – experience the service being offered as opposed to how systems are working. They can thus play a more meaningful role in ensuring that their investment in IT infrastructure supports their business’s strategic intent,” he concludes.
About Qualica Technologies (Pty) Ltd
Qualica Technologies is an international provider of optimised network and application services and solutions. Qualica develops specialist Internet applications that deliver measurable business value to blue-chip clients in diverse industries.
For additional information, please contact:
David Rogers, CEO Qualica Technologies (011) 731 1700
Marilyn de Villiers, Troika PR (011) 884 0775