Gomez Showcases Apdex

At a Gomez users' meeting held after last week's Web Experience Forum, users provided great commentary about how they use Gomez services to ensure good performance-including how they are using Apdex.  Imad Mouline, Gomez' CTO, described where all of the Gomez application performance measurement services fit into an application management maturity scale of availability, response time, and consistency (good performance for all users all the time).  The Gomez Business Pulse XF portal integrates the views and leverages web standards (e.g., XML and SOAP) built into its measurement services to make it easy to tailor your own web service performance view.

As fans of Apdex, a Business Pulse XF feature that caught our attention was that it produces Apdex scores right from the Gomez measurement platforms.  The Apdex reporting tool is a simple-to-configure widget in the Business Pulse XF dashboard.

Norm Morrison of GSI Commerce, an e-commerce service provider, gave an excellent presentation on how GSI uses Apdex to track the performance delivered to all its customers.  GSI Commerce is a billion dollar company that provides design, hosting and operations support to about 100 major businesses like Toys"R"Us, Radio Shack and CBS Sports.  The company has been on a multi-year quest to improve how they define and deliver service quality to their customers.

GSI started defining and tracking quality using several metrics. Rigorous measurement and reporting of these metrics uncovered many small, previously unnoticed issues with capacity, product configurations, and vendor bugs.  This new understanding gave them confidence to press on to write service quality into their contracts.

GSI then struggled to expand the service metrics, searching for a simple response time metric they could link to customer business needs.  They tried and adopted Apdex, and their customers now get Apdex reports that uncover issues that remained unseen in simple response time averages or availability reports.

GSI is a great example of a company that is constantly improving quality.  The fact that they adopted Apdex as a better, more aggressive way to measure and report quality and share the results with their customers is a clear commitment to continuous improvement.

What is your company doing to truly foster continuous service quality improvement?  We are looking for similar stories.  If you have an Apdex story pass it on to peter@apdex.org so we can share it with the Apdex community.

• Network Management
• Apdex
• Application Performance Management