Friday, March 21, 2008

Web services/SaaS case study: independent SLA audit

Web 2.0 Company ABC provides 24/7 web services (SaaS - software as a service) based on monthly subscriptions. They have about 500,000 subscribers. They host the service on third party data center. The provider guarantees 99.99% network uptime.

In fact the application was slow during certain hours, and poor application performance raised customer complaints, cancellations, and lowered the retention rate by 5%.

3rd party external website and network monitoring discovered that the effective SLA of the application was about 95% - partially because of application performance itself, partially because of ISP bandwidth issues.

ABC using the monitoring statistics could push ISP to provide higher uptime, and also made additional investments by clustering the application database. With these measures the uptime increased, customer satisfaction increased, subscription terminations radically descreased, and annual revenue increased by $0.5M. In addition reduced number of tickets lowered service support cost

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Banking Case Study: Improving Customer Satisfaction

Bank ABC introduced online banking to its customers to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction. Although internal IT monitoring reports 100% uptime, but the bank was receiving customer complaints about unavailability of service. As a result the Bank was losing loyal customers (~5% per month) and banking transactions were reduced.

Bank management decided to use 3rd party external transactions monitoring to find out problem the real picture. The external monitoring discovered that some online application workflows indeed had functional problems and provided poor user experience. The measures were taken to improve the situation. Particularly external monitoring provides important data which bank used to push the systems integrator for better service level. Ultimately the bank could improve the reputation and customer loyalty.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

News Portal Case Study: Increasing Online Ads Revenue

A fictitious portal company PortalWeb is a high traffic news and blog website. It has 2M page views per day and monetizes the service via ads. At 1% CTR it gets 20,000 clicks at $0.5 per click. Ads’ income is $10,000/day or $300k per month.

The website couldn’t handle growing traffic which resulted in 5% downtime. Monthly loss was $15k or $180k per year. In addition PortalWeb was losing some loyal customers and traffic wasn’t growing the way it should.

The company implemented complex external and internal network and systems monitoring, which revealed the load problem during peak hours. One of the discovered causes was related to RAM memory limits. The servers were upgraded to 4GB RAM. With small investment the Company accomplished 99.9% uptime and significantly increased its advertisement revenue. The ROI exceed all the expectations.

E-Commerce Monitoring Case Study: Optimizing Web Sales

An e-commerce Company ABC is selling in average $150.000 per month goods online. The management had ungrounded feeling that they reach optimum level of sales and they were spending significant money on site promotion and advertisement. Out of curiosity one of the managers signed up to free network and website monitoring service. To his surprise he discovered that the site is rejecting to respond in peak hours about 10% of the time. With a simple calculation it was realized that it makes $180,000 in annual loses. Management decided to use premium monitoring service in order to increase visibility and investigate IT performance bottlenecks. With relatively small investment in in infrastructure and tools the sales soared by 10%.