Howard Beader:

Why don't we get going here today? Welcome everyone.

We're really excited to share with you some great new research created in conjunction with Forrester Consulting on opportunities for retail and e-commerce organizations to increase their revenue through Internet Resilience.

I'm very pleased to also share the session today with some great presenters. First up we have Sucharita Kodali from Forrester Research, and Sucharita is going to kick off our first session. I also have my colleague, Leo Vasiliou here as well, who will cover some additional content from a Catchpoint perspective.

So today really what we're going to cover is the importance of Internet Performance Monitoring to help increase Internet Resilience for your organizations. We've got some great data that really demonstrates the importance of being resilient in these times where the Internet is really at the core of your business, almost as important as electricity is to your business today.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to Sucharita and let her introduce herself and we'll get this going. Sucharita, over to you.

Sucharita Kodali:

Great, thank you. Thank you so much, Howard. Appreciate the intro.

For those of you who don't know Forrester, Forrester is a technology research company. I work with commerce companies, so I work with anybody that has a transactional e-commerce site and with of course the solutions providers that help to improve those website experiences, both for the merchant as well as for shoppers that are looking to purchase.

So a significant part of kind of the background here is on the importance of Internet Performance Monitoring and the fact that there are often so many glitches, some of which are identified, many of which are not easily identified that become problematic for retailers. So to give you some background on this particular study, it is what we call a thought leadership paper at Forrester's consulting team in partnership with, it was essentially an extension of my team completed this project.

And to give you some background on how it was executed, it is essentially the results of a survey. And that survey included 200 plus, so 262 respondents that were executives at e-commerce companies, and we say that they were B2B and that they are kind of, they're business people. They're executives, these are not consumers that were answering this survey. And every company had more than 1000 employees because we wanted to make sure that this was representative of larger companies and was not as representative of the SMB market because that is who we wanted to talk to here.

So not surprisingly, consumers as well as employees expect flawless digital experiences. Consumer tolerance is very, very limited and even employees expect it in their own internal operations because they're often trying to get data quickly or trying to get insights quickly, and when there are glitches that is problematic all around and they can't quickly and nimbly act. Disruptions unfortunately are a daily occurrence. On average of everyone that we surveyed, the midpoint of the number of monthly Internet disruptions was 76.

That to me is astounding. I mean this is like the constant fires that you're putting out on a daily basis. And kind of having been a practitioner myself, I mean this is part of the reason why a to-do list of innovation is so difficult to tackle because your IT team is constantly kind of dedicated to putting out these fires. And we looked at different kinds of outages and problems and on average the number that the respondent said that they experienced in any given month. And as you can see there are a lot of outages across the board and this is absolutely problematic. And you probably experience it on a daily basis and it's a source of frustration for everybody.

These outages also have significant negative repercussions for every business. Of course the biggest challenges are that you are going to have consumers leaving you. You are going to essentially have your churn rate go up. Not surprisingly, respondents also said that they lost revenue and kind of probably more intangible, but equally as challenging is the lack of consumer confidence. Negative media, the list really goes on and on as to the fact that when you have an outage or a disruption, it is not a good thing.

And 65% of the respondents said that even small disruptions, it could be a glitch on a page or kind of a page not loading quickly enough. And regardless of where in the digital pipeline it occurs, naturally you would think that the closer you are to checkout, the worse it is. But even when you go to a landing page and there are problems, it really causes people to halt their purchase cycle. And in the age of digital competition where there are usually competitive merchants barely a click or two away, this is part of the reason that you need to have that flawless digital experience.

Now, in terms of actually putting a dollar volume to it, we asked the respondents, "Well, given those 76 problems that you had a month on average, how much do you think it costs you?" And as you can see, more than half of respondents say that it costs at least $100,000 to $1,000,000 per month. So when you add those up across a year, I would say that's really problematic.

And by the way, that is just the raw cost of extra time, compensation if you have to give shoppers money back for some problem, IT time spent fixing the issue. This doesn't even count for the opportunity cost, meaning that if you were to save this amount of time and actually allocate it to innovation or kind of things on your to-do list, that you would actually see additional incremental revenue. So this I would say is even an underestimation of the challenges.

Now the problem with these disruptions are that they are pretty difficult to identify. So we asked the same decision makers, the same executives, "How challenging is it to respond to these on a daily basis?" And as you can see, whether it is very challenging, somewhat challenging, or even moderately challenging, the numbers are pretty extraordinary across the board depending on which type of disruption that you are looking at. So the ability to identify these disruptions is problematic.

And we also want to say that even in looking at whether or not companies are even monitoring their full Internet Stack, because part of the reason that they may be challenged, that they are challenged in identifying things is that they're not actually monitoring things. So what you see here is that 20% say that we're still testing Internet Performance Monitoring systems. 9% say that they're not monitoring at all. And 42% say that they're only monitoring for the most critical systems. But as we said, even those small disruptions can be very problematic. And if you're not monitoring everything, there's a lot that falls through the cracks.

And we say that this is important because that full stack monitoring is crucial because we know that it makes a big difference. And when we asked people how challenging is it to quickly identify any disruptions for each of the following, you'll see that we know that for those that have that full stack monitoring on the right-hand side, they report that things are not as difficult. They know where the problems are coming from and they can quickly allocate resources to getting there. And probably that group on the right-hand side is also highly correlated to probably having fewer disruptions all together because they tend to be more aware of where they need to be allocating resources and they tend to be more on the ball.

Now, not surprisingly, we see the aggregate of the numbers on the left, about 61% of respondents say that they need tools to anticipate, detect and fix Internet problems quickly. They don't have enough. They haven't invested in enough and they haven't dedicated resources to it. And at the same time we know that 75% of respondents say that being able to identify these disruptions would deliver a significant impact on their business. It would help them. It would help them waste less time. It would help them address the things that need to be addressed quickly and not chase these things that they don't know where the problem is.

I mean, I've been on that side as a practitioner where IT teams are spending days trying to replicate a problem that they have no idea where to even start with understanding where the problem may be. It's often some comment that was made in hearsay through some customer service comment, and you're spending an obscene amount of time chasing those issues down.

Okay, so what do you do about all of these problems? And I want to spend a significant part of time on this slide because the truth is that we know that Internet Performance Monitoring is hugely important. Many of you have probably been in the thick of these issues. This is hopefully the data to give you some ammunition as you go to your executive teams looking for additional funding on this. Because the problem is, is there's so many people that know that this is crucial, yet they stumble on the lack of funding and the fact that they can't get completely full stack monitoring integrated everywhere.

So what I would suggest for those of you who are not doing the full stack monitoring or don't have enough budget, is that you or someone on your team needs to be maintaining detailed records and the estimated cost of every disruption, because the more that you are keeping on top of things and you're keeping a list of it at least even what's visible to you, the more that you can use that as sort of the business case, kind of when the time comes. So it's really important to be keeping track of things.

I can guarantee you that those 76 monthly disruptions for the most part are not making their way to your chief digital officer. There's not a list that any CEO is looking at that's evaluating that in large part because nobody's sharing it with them. But if you can be one of those voices that's creating that and is able to share that, that is going to most likely give you a pretty strong business case for getting things changed.

Then, if and when those disruptions, especially big kind of embarrassing disruptions, when the site goes down on Black Friday, those are the best times to really lobby for these in the wake of those issues or probably the best time to lobby for those solutions. So knowing how to time these issues, and lobbying doesn't mean you're going to get the funding right away, but you start to plant the seeds that really make the business case for it. And things are fresh in stakeholder memories.

I mean, usually at most businesses when there's some IT catastrophe, there's usually some sort of a group, kind of basically like a war room that gets together in the days after saying, "How can we make sure this never happens again?" And this is where you bust out the data and showcase that this is what we could have saved if we would've purchased this tool from the get-go.

Next, you want to rally allies throughout the company and make sure they're keeping track of their issues too, because you're going to have some visibility into some of the issues, but you may not have visibility into everything, if you're on the marketing team versus the merchandising team, versus the customer service or the fulfillment team. You're all going to have different pictures of the company and the more that you can all join forces and come to the table with a singular voice on this, the better. And it also may even help them make a case that you can all agree that this is a key priority and this is how you make the case for the budget. And then of course, prioritize these tools during annual budgeting cycles.

And you got to balance this in the keep the lights on investment. I think that a lot of these tools sometimes get bucketed into new technology and kind of innovation things, but there's no reason that something like an Internet Performance Monitoring tool would be ever held in the same vein as a crypto investment or a metaverse investment. I mean, those are kind of shiny objects. This is essential to your business. So just make sure that it's bucketed more as an essential that is a cost of doing business that is table stakes versus, and that has ROI by the way, versus something that is more speculative in nature.

Incorporate ROI from productivity improvements. So what I meant by that is the opportunity cost. Everybody looks at these things as like, "Oh, I have to pay for it." And, "Oh, the benefit is that maybe I can reduce IT team time. Or, "I don't have to spend as many man-hours on this." But it's not just that. It's also now that you have an extra, say 10 hours a month or 20 hours a month, because you're not focusing on these disruptions, we're not focusing on even identifying the cause of the disruption, you can now dedicate that effort to the long to-do list that everybody invariably has that they haven't been able to tackle. And there are absolutely ROIs associated with that to-do list. I've never seen a strategic list that doesn't have a prioritization of what every digital team wants to do yesterday.

The last thing is, wherever possible get some comparable metrics and case studies from companies. Maybe they're your competitors. Who cares if they're your competitors? If they're even in a sector that is somewhat adjacent or relevant to your company, just gather the before and after metrics and add that to the business case argument so that you can try to get funding

These things, it's always a challenge if you don't have the funding to get the funding, but you have to be persistent in this because this is an issue, which it shocks me, because this is something that companies have talked to me about for the last 20 years and they know they need to eat more vegetables, but they come up with 150 excuses why they haven't. Well, you need to make those changes.

So with that, I'm going to, those were my slide hand it over to Leo to talk a little bit more about the Catchpoint solution.

Leo Vasiliou:

First, thank you for everyone who's attending, giving us some of your precious time today. Second, thank you to Howard, Sucharita, Forrester Consulting for this research. Personally, I find this data to be absolutely fascinating.

As Sucharita said, my name is Leo Vasiliou, currently in our marketing organization, but I bring 16 years of practitioner experience as an IT ops and infrastructure practitioner, hopefully to help IT have better conversations with the business.

Now, we just heard about the relationship of Internet Performance Monitoring or IPM to business outcomes, which is really what this talk is about, retaining customers, improving workforce productivity, preserving or gaining revenue. But what exactly is IPM? So two answers. The first, it is the evolved set of capabilities to manage Internet disruptions before there is business impact to preserve great digital experiences. The second more functional answer is the application of active monitoring across the Internet Stack where traditional agent-based APM and other monitoring/observability tools have no reach.

Those bits and bytes fly off your servers or your critical third party servers and traverse a myriad of components to reach your workforce and customers wherever they are in the world. And you simply can't install agents on things like CDNs or third party API providers. That's where IPM comes in, active monitoring across the Internet Stack.

Now, I kindly ask if you think back a few minutes ago where Sucharita showed the data showing the relationship between two completely separate distinct survey questions where companies who invest in end-to-end IPM have substantially reduced challenges when it comes to identifying disruptions. And here I thought it was important to also showcase some of the other benefits, not the theorized by us, but as validated by our customers, improved performance, improved resolution times. We've identified something as wrong. Now let's resolve it as fast as possible. The ability to triage resulting from improved signal-to-noise ratios and arguably the most important, a good night's sleep.

And in order to realize these benefits, it's important to not only consider the direct resilience of your e-commerce touchpoints relative to the perspective of your customers, but also their supporting domain areas for your websites. Yes, absolutely 100%, but also the critical experience perspective of your customers, your internal and external networks, your workforce, which includes third party partners and your applications. And that's where we come in.

Now, we've talked about business outcomes and we just heard about the domain solution areas of customer network application, workforce and websites, but those are two ends of the same spectrum, business outcomes on one end and tools, product solutions on the other end. There's this critical gateway or common ground between those two ends of the spectrum in the form of capabilities, which in my opinion is what allows IT and the business to have new or better conversations.

So in order to achieve these outcomes across these domains, we're actually talking about these critical example capabilities. For example, for your customers, we need the ability to see how the user's experience is affected or affected by our business KPI for networks need the ability to optimize performance. For example, how network traffic flows across the Internet Stack components or the ability to select the best performing provider in the appropriate part of the world, because the Internet Stack is going to be different in different parts of the world. For your application, the ability to manage architecture complexities and gain visibility for your workforce, the ability to remotely troubleshoot and ensure connectivity and for your websites, the ability to fix and optimize web performance. For example, improve your SEO or other conversions.

So we talked about outcomes. We heard a great presentation of the data. How do we achieve those outcomes? How do we fulfill on those capabilities that you just talked through better than anyone else? And the answer very simply is monitor from where it matters.

If you're talking about Internet Performance Monitoring for the Internet Stack, then it kind of makes sense. You need to monitor from as many places on the Internet as possible. And we are proud to provide the world's largest commercially available active monitoring network. And the true beauty of this offering is the diversity and flexibility for you to adjust as needed on the fly for a given use case.

So we heard Sucharita present on behalf of Forrester Consulting, showed a little bit about some comments from our customers. And I thought I would round it out by now talking about, in Catchpoint's own words, "Why us?" So we've been at this for 14 years and have evolved the set of capabilities into what we now discuss as Internet Performance Monitoring with a platform purpose-built from the ground up for users by users to improve that signal-to-noise ratio, the industry-leading webpage test solution, and stay tuned for an announcement coming up there. But the bottom line here is we know what we're doing and this is our direct focus. It's not an indirect focus. It's something we maniacally focus on as part of our vision.

And as we get close to wrapping up, we thought we would offer some steps to Internet Resilience. So this concept of monitoring from where it matters, everyone who's accessing, conducting transactions, interacting with your touchpoints, they have a unique performance fingerprint and you need to monitor from where they are in order to match that fingerprint. And also the concept of monitoring what matters, a direct target of the experience working backward from there.

Second, we want to change the mindset, the bias, and have everyone know that there's now a new way forward. This is important as electricity as I previously said. Then we're going to be your conduit or your conductors. But really what we're talking about is there's now a proactive approach across your new network, the Internet as well as the entire Internet Stack.

And last, the capacity to adapt critical concept of resilience and fix problems before there is realized impact. So a tree might fall in the woods, but if you can fix and prevent the flooding in the village, in the valley before it's even realized, that's really what we're talking about.

And we want to go ahead and wrap this up by now opening up a poll for everyone who was graciously giving us their time today and simply ask, "Would you like to learn more at about Catchpoint?" So if you can navigate over to the poll tab and answer that question, that was the last slide that I had.

So turn it back over to our host and work toward wrapping up this session.

Sucharita Kodali:

One thing I will add is, as Leo had mentioned, there is, and a lot of the slides that I shared were really kind of agnostic to whether the disruptions were ultimately customer facing or workforce facing. And it's super, super important to focus on both, because we all know that there are so many internal disruptions that distract from the day-to-day of operations as well.

Howard Beader:

Yep. No, and definitely. And what we've also seen is that workers that aren't happy and aren't productive also aren't going to deliver great customer experience. And we need to ensure that customer experience is phenomenal these days in order to ensure you get happy customers if you can.

So Sucharita, Leo, thank you. I think this was an amazing session. I think we have some great impactful content to share. We are more than happy to answer any questions, either via the chat or reach out to us here at Catchpoint and we will definitely follow up.

The paper is available from docs here. If you scroll over to the doc tab, you can download the research paper. In addition, we will be following up via email with the presentation as well as the paper as well.

Thank you all for spending some of your valuable time with us. Thanks to my co-presenters here. Very much appreciate your time and appreciate all the hard work that Forrester Consulting has done here with us, in addition to Sucharita. And I'd be remiss to also not call out Carlos Casanova for all of the work he did here as well. So thank you both. Thanks everyone, and hope you all have a great day. Thank you.