Web-Enabled Applications and the Internet: Satisfying the Growing Expectations of Business Users

• Businesses are increasingly committed to web-enabled applications as a cost effective way of delivering critical business applications
  42% of the organisations who agreed to be interviewed for this survey were providing access over the public internet to core business applications for internal and/or external users.
• To this end businesses have high expectations around the performance of the public internet to provide access to web enabled applications
  58% of business that rely on web-enabled applications expect their users to get responses within 3 seconds, 90% within 5 seconds. 84% expect the internet to have an availability better than 99%
• However, there is dissatisfaction around the performance of the internet and the ability to measure and improve the end user experience
  64% of respondents consider that either the performance of the raw internet is not good enough or that they need to take – or are already taking – measures to improve the performance of specific applications across it
• Various technologies are used by businesses to solve these problems including hardware upgrades, content-filtering and data compression
  45% said they had turned to brute force and upgraded hardware, 39% have used content-filtering to curtail user activity and save bandwidth, 32% have implemented data compression of some sort
• Fewer had turned to subtler techniques such as managed services to monitor and maximise internet performance or appliances to handle compression, data reduction and caching
  70% of the users of web-enabled applications in this survey had implemented neither a managed service or an appliance, only 10% of the sample had deployed both
• Those that had used a managed service or appliances showed a high level of satisfaction with the performance improvements achieved
  84% of users of managed services agreed that the service had improved internet performance as expected, for appliances the figure was 66%

CONCLUSION: The internet has come a long way since the world wide wait of the 1990s and is now fundamental to the delivery of business critical applications for many organizations. The drivers behind this are traditional business ones, drive down costs, increase sales – be competitive. Web-enabled applications have a key role to play in helping organisations achieve these goals and for those that have made the commitment there is no desire to turn back. But the competitive advantage will be lost as more and more businesses follow and make the internet a key part of application delivery. As that happens the competitive edge will go to those who get the most out of it and to do that will require the deployment of advanced products and services that can help meet the growing expectations of business users to tame the internet and deliver acceptable performance and availability across it.

Scope of this report and target audience
This report looks at the degree to which today's European businesses are reliant on web-enabled applications, the benefits they are getting from investing in them, the problems they face in ensuring their availability and speed of those applications, and how these are being overcome. The report should be of value to business and IT managers who want to make better use of the internet to drive business processes but are concerned about performance and availability issues if they become too reliant on it. The research behind this report involved interviews with 400 senior IT managers and commercial managers with responsibility for business applications in enterprises with over 5,000 employees across Western Europe. The research focused on 4 industries where the web-enabling of applications was likely to have the most benefit; consumer and package goods (CPG), retail, manufacturing and information technology and communications (ITC). Quocirca would like to thank all the participants for their time to take part in the telephone interviews from which the data for this research was derived. Without their participation such reports would not be possible.

Introduction – a web-enabled world
Human beings can be fickle about new technology. Within a few years of the World Wide Web becoming widely available in the mid-1990s some started dubbing it the world wide wait. Uptake of services over the Internet, once it became public property, was rapid amongst those with the wherewithal – a computer and a telephone line – but cynicism about performance grew rapidly too.