Application performance slowdowns result in lost business.

Symantec Corp. have announced the findings of a survey conducted in July 2006 indicating that business application slowdowns affect business productivity, customer loyalty, and employee morale. Common impacts of business application performance slowdowns include sluggish response to user commands, long delays in business transactions or processes, and slow loading web pages.

For many organizations, web-based business applications have become essential to daily operations with employees, customers, and business partners. These applications include those used to run business critical processes such as financial and accounting systems, human resources, and inventory management. For consumers, these business applications are the core infrastructures used to automate online transactions such as banking, shopping, and travel. "Application performance delays are not only costly to the top line but they also erode invaluable business assets such as customer satisfaction and brand loyalty," said Henri Isenberg, vice president, server foundation and APM product group, Symantec Corp. "Customers have high expectations for their business applications and expect them to perform quickly and consistently. These findings emphasize the need for proactive end-to-end performance management solutions such as Symantec i3 that pinpoint bottlenecks, improve application performance, and increase business efficiency."

Survey Reveals That IT Staff Spend 24 Percent of Their Time Resolving Application Slowdowns

The survey revealed that 24 percent of IT staff time is devoted to addressing business application performance delays. In complex business application environments, delays can be caused by changes or updates required to keep pace with end user demand.

Additionally, the IT professionals polled in the survey recognize that the performance and availability of these applications directly affect the customer experience. Of the IT managers polled, 76 percent acknowledged that persistent delays would affect customer loyalty to their organizations.

Business Application Performance Slowdowns Affect Employee Productivity and Morale

The findings of the study also indicate that application performance slowdowns affect employee productivity and morale. Of the business users polled, 86 percent stated that persistent delays would lower their morale. In addition, 93 percent of business user respondents noted that performance issues would affect their productivity.

Consumers Polled Cite that Persistent Delays Affect Customer Loyalty

Among the 200 consumers polled, 93 percent stated that they engaged in online shopping. Of those that engaged in online shopping, 86 percent stated that frequent delays in their transactions such as shopping, travel, and banking would affect their loyalty to the service provider. In addition, of those polled, 18 percent stated that slow online performance would cause them to switch to a competitor or abandon the transaction altogether.

Symantec commissioned Applied Research to conduct the unaided survey in July 2006. Survey respondents included 200 IT managers, 200 end users in Global 1,000 organizations, and 200 consumers in North America.

Findings Underscore Critical Need for End-to-End Application Performance Management

Symantec recommends businesses take a proactive, end-to-end approach to application performance management which enables the identification and correction of problems before they affect the application user's experience. Symantec i3 provides organizations with comprehensive performance management tools that allow IT managers to proactively track, monitor and diagnose performance delays across the entire application transaction path. A key component in enabling organizations to keep their infrastructure up and running without sacrificing access to critical information, i3 ensures the availability of mission-critical applications and helps manage increasing costs and complexity across multiple tiers of the IT architecture.

Symantec i3 is a critical component of the Symantec Data Center Foundation, an integrated family of data protection, storage management, server management, and application performance management solutions. The Symantec Data Center Foundation is the only solution that enables enterprises to standardize on a single layer of infrastructure software across their entire data center that reduces IT complexity, protects information and applications, improves manageability and control of cross-platform storage and server assets, and drives down operational cost.

www.symantec.com