End-user experience monitoring is key to SaaS provider success

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Rebecca Wetzel.

Software as a Service (SaaS) providers face one critical objective: They must deliver an optimal end-user experience or risk languishing.  "SaaS providers face serious performance challenges," warns SaaS industry expert Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director of Wellesley, Mass.-based consultancy THINKstrategies and founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace, an online directory of cloud providers. "SaaS vendors must match the response times and availability of on-premises software applications offered by traditional ISVs in order to continue to satisfy end users and displace legacy applications."

But is it reasonable for customers to expect SaaS applications to offer equal performance of on-premises software? "Absolutely," says John Essex, marketing director at New Relic, a San Francisco-based application performance monitoring vendor that delivers its core product as SaaS. "If a SaaS vendor continuously monitors the end-user experience from pre-production on, the information gathered can be used to improve performance to meet the same performance standards as on-premises software."…

Many more factors affect the performance of SaaS applications than their locally accessed cousins. These factors include the performance of the application itself, the performance of the data center infrastructure on which the application runs, the performance of all the stops along the network path between application and user and, finally, performance of the browser or client software on the user’s computer or mobile device. Some users may access an application from a smartphone using a cellular data network, others from desktop computers with broadband connections and others from tablets using a public Wi-Fi hotspot…

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