FOCUS for Website Optimisation

The Challenge

Nothing frustrates your customers and potentially loses you business more than a slow or erratic website but how confident are you that an upgrade is necessary to cure your problem? Advance7 has found that businesses can often get better performance and throughput without the upgrades. Indeed only 28% of the systems we have studied have required an upgrade to achieve the performance goals.

Pinpointing the cause of the slowness is difficult. Without using hard facts as a base, upgrade decisions carry significant risk and cost.

The Service

The FOCUS service from Advance7 can help you ensure that your upgrade spend is both necessary and targeted correctly as it precisely pinpoints the bottlenecks in your website. The techniques we use enable non disruptive analysis of a live environment; thereby avoiding the need to recreate the problem in a test environment. The technique is very precise; literally studying each end to end transaction. This removes any doubt from the conclusions and enables us to deliver a detailed report which gives you the solid evidence you need to support your decisions. FOCUS eliminates any project risk as it helps ensure the optimum use of IT budgets and resources.

Performance-at-a-glance

Performance-at-a-Glance is the technique we use to illustrate the bottleneck in an end-to-end system.

The diagram below shows a typical example. Our client sells leisure services via a sophisticated website. Internet shoppers occasionally experienced long delays when adding purchases to the Shopping Basket, resulting in a significant drop in business. A supplier had told our client that two additional webservers were needed but before buying they decided to ask us for a second opinion. The results of the FOCUS study proved that the problem was an issue in a database and the fix was a simple configuration change.

Benefits

• Fast, Accurate & Low Cost - It's very difficult to recreate realistic website performance in a test environment. FOCUS uses non-disruptive analysis of your live environment saving you time and money.
• Maximum ROI - The Performance-at-a-Glance diagram precisely pinpoints the cause of problems, and the accompanying recommendations make sure you know exactly where to spend time and money to improve performance.
• Supports Your Business Case - The evidence-based nature of FOCUS ensures that you have all the proof you need to support your case for IT capital expenditure.
• Cuts Project Risk - Basing an upgrade decision on anecdote or gut-feel is very risky. FOCUS eliminates this risk.
• Avoids Wiggly Graphs - Because we measure the actual delay caused by each website component you don't need to subjectively interpret load statistics.
• Impartial Pragmatic Advice - If there's an opportunity, we'll recommend changes to optimise your application without the need for expensive upgrades.