Mergers Promise IT Deeper Site Analysis

If you're crunching data from half a dozen applications to figure out what's happening on your Web site, take heart.

A series of mergers among Web traffic analysis and performance measurement vendors should yield products that make it easier to find out who's been on a given Web site and what kind of experience they had.

The past two weeks saw the merger of several well-known vendors of Web traffic analysis and IP performance measurement software. Accrue Software Inc. purchased Marketwave Corp. for $70 million, Inktomi Corp. acquired WebSpective Software for $106 million, and Visual Networks Inc. purchased Inverse Network Technology Inc. for $177 million.

Although these vendors offer very different types of products, the mergers all represent a common goal: Meet e-businesses' urgent need for consolidated data on whether a site is satisfying Web customers.

“There are a lot of tools out there, and each vendor contributes a different piece of the puzzle in helping us to see how our site is doing, said Terry Lund, director of Internet resources at Eastman Kodak Co. “But there really needs to be a better way to integrate them. There's a lot of data, but no good way to visualize it all at once.”

John Soltys, senior Internet engineer at the Seattle Times Co., agrees. “When someone in IT or marketing asks us for data on some aspect of how our site is performing, we have to ask them what they want it for. [Their answers] determine which tool we use to collect the information,” Soltys said. “As more and more tools get involved, it can get more difficult to determine the best data source.”

Some vendors are attempting to solve that problem by integrating--and in some cases acquiring--the technology they need to provide a more complete picture of site traffic and performance, analysts said.

“If I'm an e-commerce manager, I want to know how end users are doing on my site, and I want to be able to do something about it if they aren't having a good experience,” said John Metz, vice president of network strategies at Sterling Research Inc.

“These mergers are not just about making Web traffic data more integrated,” explains Metz, “but [they are] about tying end-user behavior to specific levels of service that the IT department or the service provider will have to meet.”

Accrue Software's acquisition of Marketwave is making a splash in the Web traffic analysis tools market. Combined, the two companies have about 300 enterprise customers, including such high-profile sites as Buy.com, Citibank and Compaq.

The merger will provide a common interface between Accrue's Unix-based traffic analysis tools and Marketwave's Hit List, which runs on NT. Accrue users said they like the fact that both products collect data by sniffing network packets, rather than server log file analysis; the former approach enables them to collect site performance data as well as user click-through information.

“The fact that we can get both site data and network-response data helps us to decide when it's time to upgrade our systems to improve performance,” said the Seattle Times's Soltys.

As site performance becomes more and more critical to e-businesses, there will be a greater overlap between performance measurement and merchandising management tools, said Rick Kreysar, president and CEO of Accrue. “I don't see it happening yet,” he said. “But it's not a question of if, it's a question of when.”

Inktomi's purchase of WebSpective brings together Inktomi's Traffic Server--a Web caching and traffic management system--and WebSpective's content-replication and distribution offerings, Inktomi officials said.

“The more traffic the site takes on, the more need there is to offload and back up the data from the Web server,” said Dick Pierce, vice president of marketing at Inktomi.

“By combining caching and content replication, we're giving the enterprise customer more ways to ensure that the site is available and performing well.”

The merger of technologies from companies like Inktomi and WebSpective could also help Web- hosting providers and ISPs deliver more reliable services, Metz said.

“As e-commerce develops, more and more of these functions will be outsourced, but only if there is some way for IT managers to monitor the service levels they are getting,” he said. “Service providers are looking for ways to guarantee the performance they're delivering.”

That idea also is behind Visual Networks' acquisition of Inverse Network Technology, which provides agent software and services to help IT departments determine how their sites are performing from the end user's perspective. The combination of Visual's software--used by service providers to measure performance in frame relay and ATM networks--with Inverse's IP measurement tools should help IT managers ensure end-to-end response time in e-business applications.

“If you're going to guarantee performance in e-commerce, you need to measure response time in an IP environment, which is a very different set of metrics than in frame relay or ATM,” said John Freeman, vice president of research at Fearless Group, a consultancy. “The combination of Visual's technology with Inverse's will give IT managers a more end-to-end view of how their services and networks are performing.”

The Accrue, Inktomi and Visual Networks acquisitions all address IT managers' need to integrate data on end users' Web activity with their performance experiences on each site, said Sterling's Metz.

“If you're counting on e-commerce for more than 50 percent of your business, you can't afford not to get both types of data,” he said.