Application Performance Issues Cause Organizations to Lose Millions, According to New Aberdeen Group Study

LEXINGTON, Mass., July 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Application performance issues
are impacting overall corporate revenues by up to 9 percent, according to a
new benchmark report by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks company (NYSE: HHS)
sponsored in part by Gomez, Inc., a leading provider of web application
experience management services.

Entitled "The Lifecycle Approach Brings IT and Business Together," the
report surveyed 206 organizations between May and June 2008 and found that
58 percent of the organizations surveyed are unsatisfied with the
performance of applications that they currently use. Their top challenge is
the inability to identify issues before end users are impacted.

"Being proactive about managing application performance is no longer
optional," said Bojan Simic, research analyst, Aberdeen. "What can no
longer be ignored is the impact that application performance is having on
some of the key metrics such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction,
employee productivity, and profitability."

Using key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class companies
from Industry Average companies and Laggards, the report found that
Best-in-Class companies were five times more likely to report improvements
in quality of end user experience. It found that 65 percent of
Best-in-Class companies have the ability to measure the quality of end user
experience, with 81 percent reporting improved customer satisfaction.

Additionally, what allowed Best-in-Class organizations to outperform
the overwhelming majority of their peers was a full lifecycle approach to
application performance management including the deployment of capabilities
for predicting, monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing application
performance. For example, 63 percent of Best-in-Class companies use tools
for monitoring web application performance and 48 percent use tools to load
test their web applications.

The report also found that Best-in-Class organizations experienced:

-- 85 percent improved success rates in preventing issues with
application performance before end users are impacted, as opposed to
Laggards who reported zero percent improvement; and

-- 106 percent average improvement in application availability,
compared to Laggards who reported two percent improvement.

"Aberdeen's findings empirically underscore the correlation between
quality web experiences and business success," said Matt Poepsel, Gomez VP
of performance strategies. "For too many businesses, the end user's
experience remains clouded in obscure information -- or no information at
all -- putting business, brand and profits at risk. The Gomez(R)
ExperienceFirst(SM) platform of services helps businesses ensure quality
end user experiences by testing their web applications in development and
measuring them after deployment, mirroring the proactive, lifecycle
approach to managing and improving application performance prescribed by
Aberdeen in this report."