NEWS / EVENTS
2008 Articles
Gomez maintains an online archive of two years of selected articles written about the company or its products. All articles are maintained at the sites of the publications or blogs where they originally appeared, or if a link is not available, an abstract will appear here. The articles will appear in a separate browser window.
Note: By clicking on a link you will be leaving the Gomez site to view the article. We are not responsible for the content or policies of third-party sites.
Interview with Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez, Inc.
IPTV Evangelist 19 November, 2008
Frankly Speaking: New generation of browsers will require a technology refresh
ComputerWorld 17 November, 2008
Your IT shop is about to be forced into a technology refresh. You don’t have a choice. You can't stop it. You can’t put it off until the economy gets better. You can’t scale it back. You don’t even get to decide what products your users will move to. And nasty as that may sound, you'll be a lot better off dealing with this refresh now — before it’s totally out of your control. The refresh: Web browsers — in particular, the browsers that customers use to see your corporate Web sites.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday Retail Website Crashes to be Tracked Live, on Twitter
The Earth Times 17 November, 2008
“Delivering a quality web experience will be harder this season, since many sites won’t be optimized for the variety of browsers and browser technologies that have emerged this year,” said Matt Poepsel, VP of performance strategies at Gomez, Inc., a leading provider of web application experience management services. “We're expecting an increase in browser-related problems, in addition to the more common ‘plumbing’ issues that have plagued some retailers. We’ll be tracking both closely with the attention to detail StorefrontBacktalk’s readers and listeners expect.”
Browser Wars Fallout: Will Your Website Survive?
Website Magazine 10 November, 2008
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) owned virtually the entire browser market until just a few years ago. Back then, developers could get by testing and optimizing only for that browser. But since then, Mozilla’s Firefox browser has secured 18 percent market share and Apple’s Safari browser 6 percent, according to Net Applications. Initial reports indicate that Google’s new Chrome browser nabbed one percent market share almost overnight, and some predict it will eventually garner 20 percent. In addition, there are multiple versions of each browser in use: IE6, IE7, the beta IE8, Firefox 2 and 3, etc. All together, this underscores a fact of life for website designers, developers and your entire IT department: Web pages can look and perform differently from one browser to another.
Retailers count on Web appeal for holiday shopping
USA Today 5 November, 2008
Forrester Research predicts online retail sales will grow 12% this holiday season, the slowest growth to date but more than five times the tepid 2.2% increase the National Retail Federation predicts overall in November and December.
“The brick-and-mortar retailers who haven’t made online a priority are going to be most challenged this holiday,” says Matt Poepsel, a vice president at Web experience manager Gomez. “If their attention wasn't on the Web before, it certainly is now.” (Source: Jayne O?Donnell, “Retailers count on Web appeal for holiday shopping”, USA TODAY, November 5, 2008.)
Finish Line Enhances Online Shopping Experience
Chain Store Age 28 October, 2008
Eager to make the most of the upcoming holiday season, The Finish Line is adding an experience-management application to ensure its online shoppers receive the best Web-based shopping experience.
The Finish Line anticipates that it will process up to 150,000 unique visitors each day during the holiday season on its Web site, www.finishline.com.
That’s why the chain is adding Reality Load XF external load testing service and Reality View XF cross-browser visual testing service, both from Gomez, a Lexington, Mass.-based provider of Web-application experience-management services. Finish Line is currently using the solutions to test Web-based applications it plans to run during the holidays.
Reality Load previews how peak traffic impacts the end-user experience. Reality View enables Finish Line to view its Web sites across more than 500 combinations of browsers, platforms, operating systems and screen resolutions. This provides visibility into potential disruption situations.
By adding Gomez’s Active network XF and Active Last Mile XF, the chain can monitor services to measure the speed, availability and consistency of its Web sites from the user point of view.
“To maximize potential revenue and our brand exposure online, these solutions help us be proactive and ensure the quality of our Web experiences from development through deployment,” said Roger Underwood, Finish Line’s senior VP, information systems.
Expert Advise: Getting Your Site to Play Well With All Browsers
E-Commerce Times 24 October, 2008
Internet Explorer is always working on a new version, Firefox is growing in use, Safari is riding Mac’s rise in popularity, and now even Google has its own browser. Gomez CTO Imad Mouline offers guidelines for making your site looks right regardless of which browser the visitor is using.
Gomez Showcases Apdex
Network World 23 October, 2008
At a Gomez users’ meeting held after last week’s Web Experience Forum, users provided great commentary about how they use Gomez services to ensure good performance-including how they are using Apdex.
Performance Anxiety for Web Apps
CIO Insight 21 October, 2008
Figuring out how well your applications and services are performing for users is not as simple as testing your stuff back at the home office.
Web Experience Forum Throws IT and Web Designers Together
Network World 17 October, 2008
For the first time ever, a conference has web designers, business line managers and IT professionals rubbing shoulders in the same venue. It’s about time.
Monitoring Success: Video Streaming IS Put To The Test
Multichannel News 13 October, 2008
The expansion of streaming video across multiple platforms and devices is prompting a growing emphasis on measuring online performance and quality.
Producing Good Online Video is One Thing; Delivering It Well, Another
Video Insider 13 October, 2008
It’s not enough to make a video — you need to be sure that the content you created is the content your visitors actually see, without delays or disruptions that disappoint viewers, and undermine the value of your investment.
Gomez offers streaming media measurement service — CDNs take note
Tier1Research 23 September, 2008
Article by Dan Golding
If there is one business model that T1R likes, it’s the ‘arms merchant.’ While the term has unsavory connotations, the business model is great — rather than entering the competitive fray, you sell your service to competitors who need every edge in order to succeed. One example is VMware with its vCloud program and approach to hosting in general. Another is Gomez, which is a favorite of content delivery networks and their customers.
Gomez’s products were originally designed to simply measure website performance. With the advent of rich Internet media and applications, that became a bit more complex. Now, they focus on two areas: software quality assurance for Internet applications, and Internet website performance, including the performance of underlying hosting providers and content delivery networks. That latter point is where the ‘arms merchant’ aspect of its model comes in — almost every content delivery network and hosting provider has someone with a Gomez account somewhere in the organization, usually sales. They are running tests against themselves and their competitors in an effort to show an advantage and stave off commoditization. Many providers have also partnered with Gomez to offer measurement services to their customers as third-party SLA verification, a sign of increasing confidence in performance.
There has, however, been a fairly large missing piece in Gomez’s portfolio — the ability to measure streaming video. This is an area that is complex — measuring media performance at a single endpoint is actually a bit tough. It’s also in significant demand — the amount of streaming video on the Web has exploded in the last few years and has become increasingly commercialized (i.e., not just YouTube videos) in the past year. T1R expects the new product, ActiveStreaming XF, to be rapidly adopted by content delivery networks and almost certainly passed on to their customers via partnership arrangements. T1R also expects CDN sales and engineering staffs to immediately point this product at their competitors in order to start farming competitive data and identify poorly served customers.
What sort of metrics will the CDNs be using to identify poorly served customers? T1R thinks that excessive buffering, poor startup times (particularly from distant geographies), and poor service for larger, higher-resolution streaming objects will be targeted. Of course, while this is going on, the CDNs will also be determining how to put their best foot forward, either by giving customers examples of great performing streaming media objects or outright attempting to ‘game’ Gomez. Many of the smaller CDNs care enough about their Gomez results to attempt to cheat, although T1R is not yet convinced that anyone has successfully pulled it off yet. Still, Gomez needs to be aware that the competition is so ruthless in the content delivery sector, that even denial of service attacks Gomez testing servers that are probing competitors' CDNs have been contemplated.
T1R take
A win for Gomez and another tough blow for Keynote Systems, which still has some CDN business, in and around streaming in particular. Most CDNs and their users prefer Gomez because you can dynamically reconfigure it without any intervention and the subscription plans support a very ‘dynamic’ usage model — perfect for figuring out which of your competitors is having a bad day. In the case of ActiveStreaming XF, T1R likes the ability to identify excessive buffering and delayed video start times, which are the bane of the streaming media world — they irritate consumers to no end, leading to abortive media playbacks and a loss of impressions and revenue.
Gomez Adds Video Stream Monitoring
Contentinople 22 September, 2008
Gomez Launches New Streaming Media Monitoring Service
StreamingMedia.com’s Business 22 September, 2008
What's going on at the desktop?
Network World 18 September, 2008
Gomez grows network of end-user PCs for last mile testing
Sitting on the frontlines of the Chrome rollout
Bitcurrent 15 September, 2008
Within hours of Chrome’s release, many companies were reporting operational issues. This might seem strange: Chrome is supposed to be leaner, faster, and better. But some of those improvements meant headaches for people running websites — and for those monitoring them. We sat down with Gomez CTO Imad Mouline to look at his company’s experience with the Chrome rollout.
Smart Start Hotel Executive Report: A New Type of Benchmark
HotelExecutive.com 4 September, 2008
This article explores how the hotel websites in the Gomez Hotel Room Search Benchmark appear when viewed across a variety of browser and operating system combinations
Industry Perspectives: Best Practices for Flawless Web Multimedia Streams
StreamingMedia.com 27 August, 2008
Like most organizations, you may have to turn to a content delivery network (CDN) that specializes in multimedia streaming. But whether you choose to make an in-house investment or turn to partner support, you must be prepared to measure results.
E-Customer Experience of Utmost Importance, Report Finds
Retailer Daily 19 August, 2008
Retailers hesitate to invest in improving their customers? online shopping experience, according to a report from RSR Research and Gomez, Inc.
Crafting a web business
Internet Retailer 31 July, 2008
In the 2008 Top 500, Gomez Inc. was named most often in the web performance monitoring category, by 99 retailers.
Gomez rolls out Business Pulse XF — business dashboard for Web apps
Tier1Research 28 July, 2008
Article by Dan Golding
Gomez, which recently filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), has been making strong strides from its Web analytics roots. The most meaningful moves over the past two years have been to adapt its tools for use by Internet application providers — software as a service (SaaS) and otherwise — in both development and operations. The development and quality assurance tools have gotten the most attention, but the operational side of the business has long been its bread and butter, not to mention of greatest interest to the Internet infrastructure sector, where many hosting providers and content delivery networks partner with Gomez.
Gomez’s latest product is of special interest to the hosting sector, because of the impact on Web-based applications. Business Pulse XF is, in the most simple terms, a dashboard. That isn't terribly earth shattering, but T1R likes it because it's a very good dashboard that has a lot of potential uses across the typical SaaS provider. The emphasis on its development was on providing business intelligence metrics to non-engineering or development users at SaaS and Web application providers. The emphasis is on executive-level information and trending, not to mention the real money impact of substandard performance. The dashboard is ‘widgetized,’ so that various elements can be integrated into a software provider’s own internal dashboards and intranets — a nice feature.
One of the most interesting features is a world-map view of application performance. Every good visualization tool has to have a map, and Gomez has created a very interactive one, which will extend the applicability of this tool out of the executive and marketing offices and back into engineering and network operations centers.
There are still a few holes that Gomez needs to fill — the mapping tool needs to have a better method of visualizing not just geography, but specific carrier network impacts — knowing that performance is bad in Hong Kong is nice, but knowing that performance is bad on Global Crossing in Hong Kong is essential. The ability to provide the Business Pulse application with real-time or near real-time price-per-transaction data via a customer-facing XML interface would also be a good feature. More information on CDN performance would be the final key feature that Gomez should add — it certainly has detailed intelligence on all the major and most minor CDNs.
Business Pulse XF is a nice upsell for existing Gomez customers and should bring in some new prospects as well. Hosting providers and CDNs that partner with Gomez should find an additional opportunity in Business Pulse — the product was disclosed to that group at a partner summit several weeks ago to positive reactions.
Are Google, Yahoo the next dinosaurs?
USA Today 10 June, 2008
Artilce by Leslie Cauley
“In the next 12 to 18 months we’re going to see a growing segment of (consumers) using wireless services as the way to get on the Internet 95% of the time,” says Imad Mouline, chief technology officer of Gomez, which helps Facebook, Expedia (EXPE) and other companies improve the quality of their Web presence.
Measuring Up: Streaming Media Metrics Come of Age
Streaming Media Magazine 6 June, 2008
Artcle by Tim Siglin
“We also use another tool we highly recommend called Gomez,” said Caleb Silver, Executive Producer, Video, for CNNmoney.com, during his keynote address at Streaming Media East 2008 two weeks ago in New York. “We use it to monitor sites object by object from across the globe, to see what might be working well in the US but not loading quite so well in other countries, and then we can tweak our caching solutions.”
With IE8, consumers can shop 'til they drop, then take a 'webslice' along for the ride
Internet Retailer 1 June, 2008
Article by Paul Demery
Gomez CTO, Imad Mouline discusses the implications of Internet Explorer 8 on the web experience and website performance monitoring.
Measuring Web Site Performance From The Edge
Information Week 30 May, 2008
Article by Thomas Claburn
“The Web application is no longer what people used to think of it,” said Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez
Web app load testing tool monitors user experience
Software Quality News 27 May, 2008
Article by Michelle Davidson, Editor in Chief
“Load testing tools can help you identify performance problems in the application and on the network, but they don’t tell you what the user experience is”, said Patrick Lightbody, QA solutions product manager at Gomez Inc.
Google ranks search ads on page load time, making simplicity a virtue
Internet Retailer 23 May, 2008
Quite a few search advertisers could be affected, says Mouline of Gomez. “Do we see a wide variety of load times? Absolutely,” he says. Even for a single advertiser, the load time can vary according to time of day and geography. For instance, a server located in Boston likely will deliver a landing page more quickly to a user on the East Coast than to someone in California, Mouline says.
Setting the budget for your website
FORTUNE Small Business 12 May, 2008
Article by Kathleen Ryan O'Connor
Imad Mouline, chief technology officer for Gomez, a Lexington, Mass.-based provider of on-demand Web application experience management services, says he always advises clients to heed the golden rule: “Know your customer.”
Gomez files for initial public offering
Tier1Research 8 May, 2008
Article by Dan Golding
In a rather surprising move, Internet measurement firm Gomez has filed for an $80.5m initial public offering (IPO). The firm will be trading on the NASDAQ with stock symbol GOMZ. While T1R hasn't had a chance to review the S-1 in any detail, here are some interesting statistics: $32.6m of 2007 revenue, $5.6m of free cash flow and over 2,000 customers. Credit Suisse Securities USA and Deutsche Bank Securities will serve as the joint bookrunning managers for the offering, with William Blair Capital Partners, Wachovia Capital Markets and Pacific Crest Securities acting as co-managers.
Peer Network Tests ‘Real World’ Site Performance
InternetNews.com 2 May, 2008
Article by David Needle
Companies can get ‘last mile’ performance stats for their Web sites across a range of profiles — while users get paid for helping out.
Application performance management today, part 4: The challenges of Ajax performance testing
SearchSoftwareQuality.com 29 April, 2008
Article by Jack Vaughan, Managing Editor
“In an Ajax application, you are trying to accomplish the same things you are trying to accomplish in a traditional application. You are trying to improve the perception of it,” said Ryan Breen of Gomez Inc., which is focused on hosted tools that help customers design build, deploy and manage Web application performance.
Gomez end-user monitoring network hits 40,000 nodes
Tier1Research 23 April, 2008
Article by Dan Golding
Gomez has built a very interesting infrastructure of monitoring nodes with the idea of testing customer experience from the edge of the Internet, inward. That’s a much better methodology than pinging or even scripting from the Internet backbone, where performance is likely to be just fine. Gomez’s use of simulated Web browsers on those 40,000 testing nodes is also important — while developers would like to think that Web sites and application will behave the same way regardless of location and network condition, we all know that is simply untrue. Weird combinations of browsers, broadband networks, and Internet conditions will cause strange corner cases and generate very difficult to solve (and thus, expensive) support calls.
Basically what this boils down to is that Gomez pays end users to install its software, which is a hermetically sealed package of testing and browser simulation software that runs in the background and tests Gomez’ customers. Gomez signs on end users based on bandwidth and geography, balancing out its mix, and pays up to $45 per month, depending on how much local processor time gets used. It also pays referral fees when necessary to recruit new members into the herd. If this sounds like a hacker ‘darknet,’ well, that's what it is, but with the full permission of the end users and the target websites, rather than hijacked hosts destroying victim destinations.
Gomez’s challenge is getting the word out on this, both to potential end-user testers, as well as to their own potential customers, and making the entire deal work economically. There are also challenges from hackers attempting to game the system and defraud Gomez, but T1R feels that’s a manageable risk.
Microsoft’s new browser presents new challenges for retailers, expert says
Internet Retailer 8 April, 2008
Internet Explorer v. 8, though still in the testing phase, promises to make multiple images load faster on web sites, but it also presents retailers with the challenge of managing a big increase in server connections, says Gomez Inc. chief technology officer Imad Mouline.
Lyris increases Web page download speed with Gomez partnership
DMNews 4 March, 2008
E-mail marketing services firm Lyris Inc. said it has improved the response time of its Web page downloads by more than 30% since its recent adoption of Gomez's Active Network XF platform.
Every Pictures Tells a (Slightly Different) Story
Internet Retailer 13 February, 2008
Brokerages' Online Sites Can Still Lag
Investors.com 7 February, 2008
When it comes to coping with big market swings, only some Web brokers have learned from the past. That’s what a study found after the market’s vertigo–inducing moves last month. The Dow swung 659 points on Jan. 22, falling 464 points in the first minutes of trading before ending down 128. It had a swing of more than 800 points the next day, and seesawed the rest of that week.
Upgrades to Online Investment Sites Help Customers Keep Pace With Unruly Markets
Boston Globe 6 February, 2008
A look at how brokerage sites fared during the recent stock market turmoil. Compares several brokerages to their performance during the last troubled market
Gomez turns in another strong year of growth, exceeding 45%
Tier 1 16 January, 2008
Gomez has been one of the winners in the Internet application sector due to its enviable niche – arms merchant. While CRM, messaging, CDN, hosting and other providers battle it out, Gomez provides the application quality assurance and performance measurement services, frequently to competitors going head–to–head. The year 2007 was clearly another good one for Gomez, whose revenue increased more than 45%, a growth number similar to 2006’s.
Where did that growth come from? First, Gomez made a number of strategic acquisitions during 2007 as it moved to more of an on–demand model for developers. The acquisitions of both Sysformance and of BrowserCam were accretive to revenue in 2007. Gomez also grew organically, adding more than 400 new customers to its existing portfolio of 600 clients. For comparison, Gomez added only 180 new customers in 2006.
The acceleration of its overall customer count is likely due to Gomez’s aggressive channel strategy, which has largely focused on the hosting industry.
New customers and partners
New customers added in 2007 include Accenture, AT&T, American Eagle Outfitters, BBC, Bed Bath & Beyond, Coach, comScore Networks, Hallmark Cards, John Hancock, Martha Stewart Living, Siemens, Silverjet, Subaru of America, Associated Press, The Nielsen Company, United Parcel Service, US Airways, Yellowpages.com and Zappos. Gomez reported that its new customers are distributed across certain strategic verticals including retail, consumer products, financial services, media and publishing.
New partners for 2007 included Blast Radius, Citrix Systems, Level 3 Communications, Rackspace Managed Hosting, Ronghai Consulting (China), Samsung Networks and Torque–FKM.
Outlook
T1R predicts continued success for Gomez as it supports a growing range of software–as–a–service (SaaS) applications. The SaaS sector shows no sign of tapering off, and Gomez’s product mix binds the firm quite closely to the health of the larger SaaS market. While 45% revenue growth is stiff (and T1R has some doubts Gomez can achieve it in 2008 without additional acquisitions), there is little doubt that Gomez will see very strong growth during the coming year.
Merchant Madness
Chain Store Age.com 1 January, 2008
The peak of the shopping season has come and gone, but some retailers better prepared their online stores for holiday traffic than others.
