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October 2007 QUOCIRCA INSIGHT REPORT Web-enabled applications and the internet
Contacts: Satisfying the growing expectations of business users Bob Tarzey Businesses across Europe are becoming increasingly reliant on web-enabled applications Quocirca Ltd that are accessed over the public internet. One of the key drivers for this is to open up Tel +44 1753 855794 communications with external organisations that are fundamental to core business processes. bob.tarzey@quocirca.com Doing this provides a competitive advantage but as more and more businesses web-enable Clive Longbottom their key business applications to achieve the same goals, ever better performance and Quocirca Ltd availability across the internet needs to be achieved by the early movers to maintain their Tel +44 118 9483360 lead while satisfying the growing expectations of business users clive.longbottom@quocirca.com Businesses are increasingly committed to web-enabled applications as a cost effective way of David Keane delivering critical business applications Akamai 42% of the organisations who agreed to be interviewed for this survey were providing access over Tel +44 1784 225400 the public internet to core business applications for internal and/or external users. dkeane@akamai.com To this end businesses have high expectations around the performance of the public internet to provide access to web enabled applications 58% of business that rely on web-enabled applications expect their users to get responses within 3 RESEARCH NOTE: seconds, 90% within 5 seconds. 84% expect the internet to have an availability better than 99% However, there is dissatisfaction around the performance of the internet and the ability to The information measure and improve the end user experience presented in this report is 64% of respondents consider that either the performance of the raw internet is not good enough or based on a survey of 400 that they need to take - or are already taking - measures to improve the performance of specific IT Directors, senior IT applications across it Managers and Commercial Managers in Various technologies are used by businesses to solve these problems including hardware Western Europe. It was upgrades, content-filtering and data compression completed in the summer 45% said they had turned to brute force and upgraded hardware, 39% have used content-filtering of 2007. to curtail user activity and save bandwidth, 32% have implemented data compression of some sort Those surveyed included small and large Fewer had turned to subtler techniques such as managed services to monitor and maximise enterprises within the internet performance or appliances to handle compression, data reduction and caching following industries: 70% of the users of web-enabled applications in this survey had implemented neither a managed consumer and packaged service or an appliance, only 10% of the sample had deployed both goods (CPG), retail, manufacturing and Those that had used a managed service or appliances showed a high level of satisfaction with information technology the performance improvements achieved and communications 84% of users of managed services agreed that the service had improved internet performance as (ITC). expected, for appliances the figure was 66% Quocirca would like to CONCLUSION: The internet has come a long way since the world wide wait of the 1990s and is now thank all the respondents fundamental to the delivery of business critical applications for many organisations. The drivers behind to the survey and the this are traditional business ones, drive down costs, increase sales - be competitive. Web-enabled sponsor of this report, applications have a key role to play in helping organisations achieve these goals and for those that have Akamai. made the commitment there is no desire to turn back. But the competitive advantage will be lost as more and more businesses follow and make the internet a key part of application delivery. As that happens the competitive edge will go to those who get the most out of it and to do that will require the deployment of advanced products and services that can help meet the growing expectations of business users to tame the internet and deliver acceptable performance and availability across it.
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