Speakers: Mehdi Daoudi, Co-Founder and CEO, Catchpoint Systems; Bill Kish, CEO, Coyote Point; Peter Melerud, Co-Founder and COO, KEMP Technologies

Moderator: Bojan Simic, President and Principal Analyst, TRAC Research

Bojan Simic: Our topic today is how organizations in the small to medium size market sector manage the performance of their web applications. Before we get into the specifics of how they do that from a technology and processes perspective, one question that I have for all of our guest speakers is how they actually go about defining this sector. As you are probably aware, in some other IT markets companies go about defining their market sectors based on number of users, number of employees or revenue size. Some of these metrics are more specific in web performance management, so if you folks wouldn't mind sharing how you go about defining what falls into that SMB category for your organizations.

The market for Web performance solutions has experienced significant changes in 2010 and many of the trends that have been driving new dynamics in this market are expected to be even more accelerated in 2011.

Traditionally, these types of solutions have been predominantly deployed by large Web properties (media, entertainment, social networks, etc.) and organizations that are either using their websites to generate revenues or rely on Web portals to share information internally. However, changes in the way that business users are accessing corporate data are causing Web applications to became more than just revenue generating, branding or collaboration tools. In 2010 we have seen applications that are being accessed through Web browsers and delivered over public Internet become more critical beyond business-to-customer (B2C) environments, as organizations are increasingly using these applications to communicate with their employees and partners.

End-user organizations who participated in TRAC’s recent survey reported that they anticipate 11% of overall network traffic that is currently being delivered over corporate private networks to be delivered over public Internet in the next 12 months. Deployments of SaaS applications, more organizations considering and deploying Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) models and looking to achieve cost savings by leveraging advantages of public Internet are increasing the importance of managing Web performance. As organizations are becoming more dependent on the performance of Web applications they are also realizing that some of the same trends that are driving increases in the importance of these applications are also posing new performance management challenges.

New challenges of managing Web performance are forcing both technology vendors and end-user organizations to respond, which in turn is driving new dynamics in this market. Based on TRAC’s recent research, we identified ten areas that are significantly impacting how different flavors on Web performance management solutions are being deployed and managed, as well as some of the capabilities that are becoming more important in this market.