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.

Software solutions for managing application delivery

Solutions for managing the delivery of Web applications (load balancing, application acceleration, etc.) have traditionally been delivered as hardware appliances. Not that long ago Zeus Technology was the only vendor in this space that was providing a software-based solution for Web application delivery, while the majority of other vendors were expressing a lot of skepticism about the effectiveness of this type of approach. What happened in 2010 is that the majority of these same vendors launched their own software products, predominantly in the form of virtual appliance.

This trend has been primarily driven by the emergence of virtualization technologies and cloud deployments, but also by the need of organizations to reduce their infrastructure footprints, reduce total cost of ownership of these solutions and improve flexibility of management. So the question is: does the fact that software application delivery products are becoming more prevalent mean that hardware based products could soon become obsolete? No, that is not very likely.

The majority of deployments of virtual appliances for managing the delivery of Web applications are still limited to specific usage scenarios and typically resonate better with Web hosting companies and cloud providers than enterprises. However, if vendors can guarantee their customers that virtual appliances can deliver the same performance as their hardware products, this new type of delivery method could start experiencing a wider adoption in the enterprise.

It should also be noted that even though many vendors, such as A10 Networks, F5, Citrix, Coyote Point, KEMP Technologies or Radware, are now offering virtual appliances for managing the delivery of Web applications, there are still significant differences between the capabilities of these products and usage scenarios where they can be effectively deployed.

Availability vs. response times

TRAC’s recent survey shows that revenue generating websites are losing twice as much revenue due to issues with response times than to issues with availability of their websites. These organizations reported that they are losing nearly 5 times more revenues per minute of downtime, as compared with a minute when they are experiencing slowdowns, but they also reported that they are experiencing the slowdowns 10 times more often. Part of the challenge for these organizations is that many of them are still predominately focused on ensuring that their website doesn’t experience any outages and they tend to put more effort into improving speeds of their websites, only after they have the availability part already figured out. That comes as a result of the fact that issues with website availability have an immediate impact on their business goals and reputation of their teams in charge of website performance. However, what many of them are missing is that, on the long run, website slowdowns can impact their business more than performance outages. It is encouraging that in 2010 we have seen more organizations managing availability and response times as a part of a unified strategy, as opposed to treating their actions for managing website speed and the quality of end-user experience as an “add-on” to their initiatives for ensuring optimal availability.

Mobile Web

Managing the performance of Web applications that are accessed on mobile devices is becoming an integral part of Web strategies for many end-user organizations. As a result, having this type of capability is becoming a “must have” feature for Web performance management vendors, especially those that specialize in monitoring the quality of end-user experience for Web applications. For some time, Keynote was one of a few vendors that focused on this issue, but over the last 18 months we have seen a number of moves where other vendors enhanced their capabilities for managing mobile Web. Gomez (acquired by Compuware) added this type of capability in 2009, AlertSite in October of 2010 and some other vendors in this space will be soon announcing their mobile monitoring products.