Earlier this year (March/April) Webmetrics exhibited at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco and we found that there were quite a few unanswered questions on the mind of fellow exhibitors and attendees. The most prominent questions were:
- Service Level Agreements (SLA) – Just about everyone who came to the Webmetrics booth had some sort of requirement for SLA reporting. Mostly we saw that the requirement was to provide an SLA to users of a service (since many of the exhibitors were companies that have a SaaS model/platform or at least were providing web services that could be used by their clients to extend functionality of existing products. There were some cases where tracking SLA values was more geared towards keeping tabs on SLAs that are offered by third parties but the overwhelming majority were looking to provide their clients with the SLAs that had been agreed upon. This indicates that many companies are becoming proactive in sharing information with their clients (in the form of SLAs). Which leads to…
- Collaboration – Everyone understood. Very rarely did someone not get the idea of collaborating with third parties or partners. One of the main ideas behind the Web 2.0 movement is to develop software using a service model. Just about everyone in attendance of the conference was entrenched with some sort of third party. People are naturally suspicious which makes for a bad situation when a third party offers up some metrics that were collected in house. Often reports are generated by the provider of a service and then handed over to the user without any explanation of what errors are, where data was collected from, or even…god forbid, incomplete data sets.
- Problems – Finally, the majority of people who stopped by the booth had experienced some sort of performance issue. In most cases it was uptime, that is, the service being provided was not available for extended periods of time (or unavailable for short periods of time very frequently). Although users of web services are becoming more sophisticated with their consumption they need really need to buckle down and pay attention to SLAs and demand (or track) SLA information (see the first point).
I will be at the Web 2.0 conference in New York City this September. Please feel free to stop by the Webmetrics booth and share your thoughts and opinions with me on the performance issues that surround web eco-systems and Web 2.0 applications. September.
The performance for this blog (today’s average load time and uptime):
- Average load time is 1.78seconds.
- Availability (uptime) is 100%.
