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.

Dynamic Web

69% of organizations that participated in TRAC’s recent survey reported that managing dynamic content is one of the top challenges for managing Web performance. Many of these organizations are finding that some of the traditional techniques for accelerating Web performance are not as effective in dealing with the challenges of a new and more dynamic Web. For example, many organizations are realizing that traditional caching mechanisms are not as effective when used for Web applications that have a high amount of dynamic content. Web applications such as social media and those that include a high amount of user generated content are making this challenge even more prevalent with organizations. However, this trend also creates opportunities for vendors who are providing solutions that are designed for addressing this problem from different perspectives. Examples of emerging vendors that are well positioned to address this issue include Strangeloop Networks, whose solution includes several innovative techniques for caching and optimizing dynamic Web content, as well as Cotendo and FastSoft, who provide solutions for dynamic Web acceleration.

New CDN strategies

29% of organizations in TRAC’s recent survey, who are deploying content delivery networks (CDN) services, reported that they are using two or more service providers, with another 10% reporting that they plan to adopt multi-vendor CDN strategy within the next 12 months.  The key drivers behind this trend are the need to minimize the negative impact of performance issues on business goals and cost savings. This trend not only created opportunities for some of the leading CDNs, such as Akamai, Limelight Networks or Mirror Image, to win a new business without having to replace each other, but also created the need for new management capabilities. Organizations that are using multiple CDN services are looking to find the best way to leverage these services and an optimal route for delivering the data. New vendors, such as 3Crowd, are already looking to capitalize on this opportunity by offering capabilities for balancing load between multiple CDNs.

Flexibility of management

Organizations are becoming increasingly interested in ensuring that their Web performance management solutions can easily scale up and down and adjust to changes in their business demand. This has especially been a challenge in the market for application delivery solutions as many of them are delivered as hardware appliances. Having to “rip-and-replace” these solutions, because organizations need more management capabilities, is associated with a significant management cost. Crescendo Networks took an innovative approach to solving this problem by introducing their HyperScale product in April of 2010. The product allows organizations to seamlessly add new boxes on top of solutions that they already have in place when they need more capacity, as opposed to forcing them to replace the old products.

Additionally, many application delivery appliances now come with multiple functionalities for applications delivery (e.g. load balancing, caching, TCP acceleration, etc.). In some cases, this can create management challenges, as some organizations might not need all of these functionalities and they  could interfere with capabilities that are being used. Vendors have recognized this challenge and many of them are providing solutions that allow organizations to turn off capabilities that they do not need.

Additionally, flexibility of Web performance management is an attribute that is especially important in the service provider market as application delivery vendors, such as F5, Cisco and Brocade, are increasingly focusing on this sector.

SaaS applications

TRAC’s survey shows that 74% of organizations that are using SaaS application still rely on data received from their SaaS providers and do not have dedicated tools for managing the performance of these applications. As organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on the performance of these applications, SaaS providers are looking to enhance their capabilities for visibility into the quality of end-user experience for their services. At the same time, end-user organizations are looking for ways to keep their SaaS providers “honest” and deploy third party monitoring tools that would allow them to compare the performance of these applications to SLAs. This creates new opportunities for Web performance monitoring vendors and increases their addressable market, which as a result, new vendors, such as Catchpoint Systems and Yottaa, are entering this market.

SMB

Many small and medium size businesses that heavily depend on the performance of their websites to grow revenues and achieve other key business goals still do not have some basic capabilities for managing Web performance. Even though they are often justifying a lack of these capabilities with limited IT budgets and the inability to create a business case for these investments, for many of them the true challenge is a lack of visibility into how issues with Web performance are impacting their businesses. As many SMB companies are increasingly depending on the Web to grow their business, this market segment could be one of the key drivers of the future growth of Web performance management solutions. However, traditionally, not many vendors have been providing solutions that would be appealing to this market segment from both technology and cost perspectives. Some of the vendors that have already been able to capitalize on opportunities in this market include Coyote Point and KEMP Technologies.

Web Services

From a technology perspective, Web Services are not a new concept and organizations have been using applications that draw data from other applications and data sources for a while. However, in 2010, we have seen a trend of organizations becoming increasingly dependent on these services, not only when managing their websites, but also when managing their communications with partners and suppliers. This creates new opportunities for Web performance monitoring vendors and companies, such as Webmetrics, Triometric and AlertSite, have been providing solutions for visibility into the performance of Web services and APIs.

Third-party services

71% of organizations that participated in TRAC’s survey reported that the performance of third party services is creating significant challenges for managing Web performance. Websites are becoming increasingly dependent on third party services, such as social media modules, ads, shopping carts, web analytics, CDN and DNS, and issues with the performance of these services can significantly deteriorate the quality of end-user experience. Additionally, organizations often have very little control of how these services perform on their websites. In order to have more control over the impact of these services on the quality of end-user experience, organizations need to be more proactive and be able to accurately estimate the impact of these services on the performance of their Web applications before they are deployed.

Web performance monitoring vendors, such as Gomez, Keynote and Coradiant, have been focusing on this issue and each of them have enhanced their capabilities for monitoring the impact of third party services on the quality of end-user experience.

As the Web is playing a more important role in how organizations across different industry sectors are doing business, the importance of the effective management of Web applications is increasing, even more. At the same time, deployments of public cloud services, virtualization technologies, new types of content and changes in end-user preferences for accessing the data are changing the dynamics in the market for Web performance management solutions and forcing vendors to innovate. Even though we have seen some significant changes in this market in 2010, initiatives that end-user organizations are launching and the roadmaps of technology vendors indicate that 2011 could be an even more eventful year.