Matthew Poepsel, VP and general manager of application management, said the first such service in the UK covers the 30 top travel websites, measuring QoS to the end user in terms of availability, responsiveness and consistency, with similar benchmarks scheduled for insurance, retail banking, utilities and retailing.
Behind the headline ranking, he said, subscribers can get drill down for detailed information on how they and their competitors fared in specific metrics. The idea is that once they have bought into the benchmark to know where they stand competitively, they can then be persuaded to take a subscription to the company’s flagship Gomez Performance Network.
This service measures end user experience from within a corporate data center, major backbone and last mile, and can post the test results to systems management frameworks, or by email or to a dashboard for a CFO, for example.
We measure the performance and manageability of applications, establishing a baseline for improving end user experience, said Poepsel.
The move comes a matter of weeks after one of Gomez’s main rivals, Keynote Systems Inc, increased its presence in Europe with the acquisition of German ISV Sigos Systemintegration GmbH, which also brought it a new area of business (mobile internet site metrics) and a new business model, Sigos being primarily in software licensing rather than services.
Poepsel said the two companies’ business models were different, Keynote having stepped up its consulting business last year, firstly with the acquisition of Hudson Williams in the UK and then, in December with a unit of WatchFire which had started life as the consulting arm of Gomez. We’d divesting that business already, he explained, adding that Gomez’s focus is entirely on subscription-based activities.
