Company updates application performance management suite with tools that track customer sessions with online apps
TeaLeaf this week introduced a dashboard application that the company says will enable users of its flagship application performance management product better understand why customers abandon online applications and Web sites.
The dashboard application, TeaLeaf cxView, offers IT and business managers a portal through which they can monitor application performance from the user or customer perspective and pose what-if scenarios to improve performance going forward, the company says. The product, which works with TeaLeaf CX, provides business-impact dashboards that track in real-time performance indicators.
In addition, the company upgraded CX to perform event analysis in real time. The product also lets IT managers replay the experience a customer or user had with an application via any browser or Flex and Flash applications.
“Our customers have problems with conversion and drop-off rates on their sites and want to use TeaLeaf to understand why abandonment of a particular page or application is high,” says John Dawes, vice president of product management at TeaLeaf. “This can go beyond availability and performance metrics to understand what the patience of the end user will endure.”
Application and site abandonment can equal big money to some online businesses. For instance, in the case of online retailers, TeaLeaf says that 40% of users switch to a competitor or abandon the online purchase entirely if they hit a snag with an online application or Web site transaction. The company also reports that 4.5% of all transactions are affected by performance or other issues, which roughly translates to $9 billion in transaction affected in 2006. And TeaLeaf says one unknown issue can equal the financial impact of one week of downtime.
The information collected and analyzed by TeaLeaf products could help IT managers more quickly pinpoint the source of problems and fix them to prevent further financial or performance impact, industry watchers say.
“The neat thing is the analysis blends business and technical issues. You can on one graph compare whether app errors, performance, failed logins or shipping sticker-shock affect the abandonment rate more than the others,” says Jasmine Noel, principal at research firm Ptak, Noel and Associates. “If one has a bigger effect than the others, you know that that is where to invest your project money. So if transactions start falling off, it is no longer blame IT performance first.”
TeaLeaf CX is software loaded onto a dedicated appliance, which connects to a span or mirror port on a switch observing HTTP and HTTPS traffic. The software monitors the user sessions with a Web site and its applications. It generates alerts based on specified events, correlates captured data and provides detailed reporting. Add-ons such as cxView sit on top of the TeaLeaf CX data store and use the data stored there to perform their specific tasks. A viewer component replays user sessions, enabling IT groups to reproduce problems. Using the viewer, IT managers can see what the user saw, the company says.
With competition mostly from such companies as Coradiant, Gomez, Keynote and Mercury Interactive, TeaLeaf says the add-on applications, such as cxView, will help further differentiate its software from Web site and application performance-management vendors.
Available now, TeaLeaf CX 6.0 starts at about $80,000 for an average implementation. Pricing for the add-ons such as cxView depends on customer implementations.
