Gomez Unveils Real-User Web Experience Measurement Service

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Monday, November 13, 2006; 04:16 AM

Gomez Inc., a provider web application experience management solutions, released Gomez Actual Experience XF (Experience First), an on-demand service capable of providing an authentic measure of the online customer experience from a browser-based perspective. The unique vantage point of Actual Experience XF enables organizations to measure the performance of critical elements in a web application that are invisible to traditional behind-the-firewall-based passive monitoring solutions. Actual Experience XF complements Gomez's existing active monitoring solutions, allowing the company to combine both actual-user (browser-based) and active monitoring (agent-driven tests) so that organizations can deliver superior online experiences that satisfy customers, strengthen brands and drive profits.
Gomez said that managing the online customer experience is increasingly challenging as elements outside an organization's direct control, such as third-party content and new technologies like Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), play an increasingly greater role in the delivery of web applications. Through its browser-based view, Actual Experience XF measures the customer experience and how it is affected by myriad components that make up a today's complex web applications.

Monitoring applications by Gomez. Source: www.gomez.com.

"It's a composite world today," said Steve Trimbo, director of online operations at BestBuy.com. "So much of the web experience a company provides hinges on content, applications and infrastructure delivered by third parties. As we move toward rich Internet technologies such as Ajax, even less of the customer experience is under our direct control. Yet the customer still holds the host brand accountable for the web experience and expects much richer services delivered instantaneously. Actual Experience XF will help organizations understand exactly what their users are experiencing so they can improve those experiences. No other company can provide this 360-degree view."

Actual Experience XF measures many aspects of performance, including download times, abandonment rates and service consistency. It provides  insight into the web experience and how perceived performance is affected by geographic or machine-specific parameters such as the size of the browser window, browser type, first-time/repeat visitor status and browser cache utilization.

"Actual Experience XF will enable enterprises to leverage the power of the end-user view," said Peter Sevcik, president of NetForecast Inc., a Charlottesville, Va., research firm. "This new service has been the missing link to really understanding and managing the user experience. Gomez is clearly on a strategic path to be the most comprehensive web experience management authority."

Actual Experience XF also reveals how web performance affects business results by using dashboards to track important business processes such as online sales conversion or shopping cart abandonment. Customers can drill down for in-depth data on what may be responsible for a problem, and then quickly resolve it.

Gomez said the new product exemplifies the company's commitment to deliver comprehensive services that allow its customers to manage the entire web experience - from application design and testing through deployment and the entire application life cycle. Actual Experience XF is the first of several new service offerings that will form the core of Gomez's new web application experience management platform, also announced today, called the Gomez ExperienceFirst Platform.

"Building on our expertise in performance management, our vision over the next 12 months is to build out a comprehensive platform of on-demand services that enables companies to design, develop, validate, deploy, operate, analyze and improve web application experiences," said Jaime Ellertson, Gomez CEO. "This life-cycle approach will ensure peak-performing web applications from the early design phase through deployment and the entire application life cycle."

The new Gomez ExperienceFirst Platform addresses the sea change in web development: Developers increasingly rely on services provided by third parties and must aggregate disparate content, logic and data from around the Internet. This results in less direct control over their customers' web experience. Complicating matters is the fact that the browser processes more data than ever, often bypassing the web site host.

"Ensuring superior web experiences starts with a true measure of the user experience complemented by systematic tests from the backbone and last mile," said Ellertson. "It concludes with an end-to-end management scheme from an application's conception to its day-to-day operation."

Actual Experience XF will be available for general release as a separate set of services in the first Quarter of 2007.