Company previews on-demand management service that is said to measure actual customer experience from a browser perspective.
Gomez this week is announcing plans to release a service in 2007 to enable IT managers to get more detailed data on Web application performance from an end-user perspective.
Gomez’s Actual Experience XF can measure performance aspects of an online application, including download times, abandonment rates and service consistency. The service complements existing services provided via Gomez Performance Network, renamed to Gomez ExperienceFirst Network services. The service can also tell IT or business managers where the customer is logging onto the site from demographically, the type of browser they are using and the size of the browser window — which can help Web site developers tweak page appearance, Gomez says.
Essentially, Actual Experience will show IT managers what the end user saw, says CTO Imad Mouline.
“We are going to sit inside transactions on the browser, which lets us see the actual traffic as it happens,” he says. The Actual Experience XF service would require customers to embed a small bit of software code on their Web site, and when customers request the page and applications on it, the Gomez network is triggered to start measuring performance.
The on-demand service utilizes the company’s Universal Transaction Agent (UTA), which Gomez says emulates browser/Web site interaction to capture and report single and multi-step, transactional Web page performance information. The agents reside on Gomez’s network, to which customers connect via a VPN. Depending on the amount of services purchased, customers can also have agents installed within their firewalls and located closer to end-user desktops. The company says it offers a non-intrusive, lightweight agent to report on the performance in the last mile.
“Agent-based technologies can be a pretty big headache for network administrators,” says Lisa Erickson-Harris, a research vice president at Enterprise Management Associates. “But agents can also provide more granular and detailed data as to what is actually happening on the desktop and much closer to the end user.”
Gomez competes most directly with Keynote Systems, but also runs into vendors of end-user and customer experience measurement appliances such as Coradiant and Tealeaf. Actual Experience XF is scheduled to be generally available in the first quarter of 2007. The company says pricing will be based on consumption, and that it will release pricing for the service when it becomes available.
