Howard Beader

01:16 - 03:12

Alright. Welcome , everyone.

Thank you all for joining us. We're really excited today to share , some of the great findings from this latest , second , commissioned , ecommerce report that we worked on with our friends at Forrester.

So before we jump in , what I'd like to do is just make sure everyone's familiar with the platform , and understands how to use the tool. Looks like folks , have found the chat.

Chat's over on the right , and you can ask questions there. You can say hello there.

There is also a q and a tab there as well where you can ask questions , and we will , respond as quickly as possible , or our experts , supporting us backstage will help respond as well. We have a document tab where you're able to actually download the study very , very quickly.

We will be , talking through the slides , and , any questions , feel free to just put them in the chat. I also , at some point , later in the presentation , we'll be putting up a poll to ask you all some questions , and you'll see that , pop up.

And you'll be able to jump in. It's right on the left side of your screen and be able to answer some questions.

So with that , like to , very , happily welcome our guest speaker , Saturita Kedali. Saturita , if you'd like to introduce yourself.

Sucharita Kodali

03:12 - 03:46

Thanks , Howard. For those of you who may not know Forrester , Forrester is a technology research company.

We're headquartered in Cambridge , Massachusetts , and we work with companies that are in I work specifically with companies that are either retailers or brands and the technology ecosystem that supports that sector of the economy. I've been at re in , at Forrester , for about almost twenty years and have been in the retail industry for nearly thirty , and we're gonna talk a lot about , commerce , ecommerce , and digital commerce today.

Howard Beader

03:46 - 03:55

Thanks , Sucharita. And very happy to also welcome , my partner in crime here at CatchPoint , Leo.

Leo Vasiliou

03:55 - 04:26

Hello , team Leo Vasilou. And , lest you worry about my product marketing title , just know that I spent seventeen years in the IT operations trenches before moving to the dark side , and I've still got the battle scars to prove it.

Having said that , I'm very excited to have the opportunity to speak with Sucharita and team , to discuss the data with fellow researchers. So , back , back over to you , Howard.

Thanks , Leo. I I don't know.

Howard Beader

04:26 - 04:38

if we're the dark side. I mean , I I may maybe that's for sales and marketing , but all good.

Alright. So , Satorino , shall we jump in ?

Sucharita Kodali

04:38 - 06:43

Yeah. Yeah.

Oops so. So , I'll walk you through our , the the methodology here in this study.

So , a few years ago , CatchPoint commissioned Forrester. We have a consulting team at Forrester that , conducts and actually does a lot of the the actual legwork on these , these studies , but it was essentially a thought leadership study.

And we did two tranches. We did one in 2023 and another in 2025 , and the goal was to explore Internet performance monitoring.

So you're gonna hear , the acronym IPM through this entire presentation , and that's what it refers to. And , we wanted to explore the importance of it , for consumer brands and retailers , and in particular , the impact that it has , of actually having not only , an actual deployment , a set of deployments and technology to support IPM , but also the costs of failures and the , the widespread nature of failures , really.

So that is essentially what this study is designed to capture. We looked at different regions of the world because we wanted a global perspective.

So , we have rep we have representation and survey responses from The US , Canada , Germany , France , and The UK , as well as Singapore and Australia. So some representation in the APAC region as well.

There were this was a b to b survey. So we asked , the people who are leaders in their respective commerce organizations that would have insight and visibility.

So they tended to be in either ecommerce or digital roles , and the total sample set was , was a and you had to have an at least a thousand employees within your organization because we did wanna filter out , any any very , very small , small or even medium sized orgs. So , that's a little bit of the background.

Leo Vasiliou

06:43 - 07:14

Thanks , Sujirita. And I'll just kind of ask , for , for the comments about doing it two years ago.

Is there any particular way our audience should think about ? Or maybe what I'm trying to ask is why would our audience appreciate the fact that , orgs like CatchPoint commission orgs like Forrester to redo and re research data that's , that's already been researched ? Why why would our listeners appreciate that ?

Sucharita Kodali

07:14 - 08:12

Yeah. A lot of it is just the timeliness and seeing how things are trending in one direction or another.

That's really the importance of the time series nature of it. And certainly wasn't a study that took two years.

It was more we wanted two discrete data points and to see how , trends were evolving and shifting. One of the things that I often find is that , many of the retailers and brands that I talk to often like to have the most updated data.

So naturally , for them as as in particular , as they're making business cases for a particular deployment or an investment , it makes more sense to have data from 2025 versus a few years ago. But those that that comparison is crucial , to just understand how things are trending and also it in in many ways helps to validate how things , are are progressing over time , particularly with respect to technology investments.

Leo Vasiliou

08:12 - 08:19

Mhmm. Thank you.

Appreciate that. And pardon the interruption.

So I'll go ahead and just let you , let you continue.

Sucharita Kodali

08:19 - 11:44

Yeah. So this is at the highest level , some of the , the the the reasons for being , which is , at the end of the day , consumers and employees.

So it is both the people who work on your teams and are dependent on technology , as well as end shoppers. They expect flawless digital experiences.

When , when you say when you see nearly three quarters , 72% , of respondents say that consumer tolerance for disrupted experiences is really at an all time low , and no doubt because their expectations , they see , fast Internet speeds. We're at , you know , kind of , I think , five , six g around the world.

So so these things are incredibly , a high bar for for every company to to really meet. What you also have is that the workplace also expects frictionless , digital experiences , because every employee is also a consumer.

And they have been honed on strong experiences across different devices , touching , multiple applications within even a single website experience. So all of these , elements are are absolutely essential.

Just to give you a sense also from , you you know , some of my my other research that's more industry , broad , retail in the world is a $25,000,000,000,000 sector. It covers the consumers are spending nearly a quarter of the world's GDP on goods , and about 20% of that , nearly $5,000,000,000,000.

I hope I said trillion. I , I'm talking so fast.

I I I sometimes , you know , kind of , misspeak. But , so global retail is is 25,000,000,000,000.

Ecommerce globally is $5,000,000,000,000. So it is large.

It is not a trivial number. It's 5% of all of global GDP , and , China and The US alone comprise about , 3,000,000,000,000 of that $5,000,000,000,000.

And then you have the major markets in the rest of the world comprising the other 2,000,000,000,000. So these are huge , huge sectors of consumer spend.

They're a huge sector of the global economy , and they expect and they're growing faster than other other they're growing faster than than all of retail , and it's growing faster than than other sectors as well. So in that world , when you have such a large portion of spend , you have it growing quickly , and you have the expectations for performance being as high as they are , you have this this need , to really make sure that that digital experience is as smooth and seamless and , as top notch as it really can be.

But now all that said , you know , kind of this is what the data says. This is a lot of my experience in , conversations I've had with retailers and brands.

But Howard and Leo , what are your reflections on this as well ? I'm sure your , your your customers also say similar thing might have similar findings.

Howard Beader

11:44 - 12:49

A %. So , Tirito , we are seeing very similar things across our customers.

Our customers are cross industry. They tend to be leaders in their industries , in their respective markets.

And what we're hearing from them is that their customers are demanding great customer experiences. But it's the as you said as well , it's not just their customers.

Their employees also are demanding frictionless experiences. They don't want to show up at work and have things not work.

It's gotta be seamless. Things have to work better.

And , you know , we're really talking about , minimizing outages , minimizing disruptions , protecting revenue , improving conversions , improving employee experiences , and all of it really ties together , to help organizations grow.

Sucharita Kodali

12:49 - 12:50

Absolutely.

Howard Beader

12:50 - 13:04

We're gonna get into a couple of more detailed , examples as we go through , but , these are just a few of the organizations that we're working with today.

Sucharita Kodali

13:04 - 15:11

Great. So I wanna step back and and talk a little bit about the data on disruptions.

And what we see from from the data is , in fact , disruptions are are a daily occurrence. And , and this is something that and we'll talk in a moment about the kinds of disruptions , but at the at the , you you know , kind of the the places where they occur , how they impact impact organizations is not trivial.

So what you have in green are the , the types of disruptions and the places where those disruptions exist where it's one to five. So it's a relatively modest number.

As you go through the charts , you'll see that there are times , there are , you you know , kind of a number of , of just of of of of of problems , like , particularly with hosting partners or APIs and gateways where on average , there's a higher number of disruptions. You have the the yellow and the blue being substantially lower.

With hosting partners , you have , you you know , kind of 50% of the disruptions being being you know , kind of 50% of the disruptions , are are six plus times a day , which is which is really quite extraordinary. On the other hand , you have things like the like , websites themselves where it's actually probably a smaller number of disruptions in large part because I think in tech organizations , those are some of the most visible ones.

It's a lot of the partnerships and the things that are may impact , form fields that get submitted or other parts of the flow of , of of an entire , transaction that , that may not get as noticed , but yet , but yet they're there and , they're very problematic. And , as you'll see in a couple of slides , they cost money too.

Now all this said , Leo , what does this say about the state of the industry ?

Leo Vasiliou

15:11 - 17:16

I mean , I'm just gonna have a reaction which I think , might be the same as everyone else when you look at the big blue number , 72 average number. That probably means , larger orgs experience more that is more costly.

Right ? So it's not a matter of if , it's a it's a matter of when despite our best , intentions. But to me , it , it it reads that it's not a problem.

You can simply stuff down into the IT closet , if you will. Right ? It's a it's a real business problem.

And I mean , just looking at some of those , components. Right ? So websites , Internet stack components , connectivity , reachability , proprietary apps , point of sale , devices , your physical locations are , the , you know , everything else on the list is like the the highlight what it does for me is highlight the need for visibility into our various stat components.

And , this is a conversation about , IBM , right , Internet performance monitoring , and we have a way to go. I don't wanna misrepresent , but as we'll see , early adopters , of Internet performance monitoring are seeing , the benefits , and I think we're gonna get , into that here in a minute.

So , Sucharita , if I could maybe just kinda transition back over to you , I wanna talk about kinda how we open this session with is that , what were the numbers ? 72% acknowledging tolerance for disruptions at an all time low , sixty seven percent for saying the workforce requires the same frictionless experience. So we've we've we're starting to paint a pinch of ear , and I think people can start to see where we're going.

So I just wanted to ask you , what are the actual business abilities that people should be evaluating to proactively ensure and meet those expectations ?

Sucharita Kodali

17:16 - 21:26

Right. Right.

And , absolutely , Leo. The the the truth is is that when you have so many of these small disruptions that are happening , that can be pretty catastrophic.

And and often , they may not be as visible , but yet , you know , kind of you have them chipping away at different parts of an operation , whether it is , how consumers can access content or whether content can get uploaded in an accurate fashion or whether information is flowing back and forth in , you know , kind of the fulfillment center and the warehouse. All of these are absolutely essential , and , and they can they can cause big problems.

So I I think that that's really what the the heart of this is about , which is that often the large disruptions are some of the most visible , but we tend to see a lot of small daily problems , and even in some cases , a lot of daily problems that are creating problems for for organizations. So so this is absolutely part part of the part of the issue.

And one of the single biggest , reasons that these disruptions are so problematic is that there is a negative ROI. There is an enormous cost that is associated with any type of disruption.

When we ask , when we ask the respondents in the survey , what was the business impact , you'll see that there are any number of challenges. And it some of the most visible ones that we hear about are things like increased customer churn and , of course , you know , revenue is gone because if there is an issue with the site , you're unable to transact and that , of course , adversely impacts whether or not you are making as much money as you could make.

You have reputational damage. You have , just ultimately just a bad customer experience , which can result in things like low and , net promoter scores or other adverse ways that consumers may choose not to transact.

In other scenarios , you also have , workforce issues where can where some of your employees may be so frustrated that they may quit or they may go to competitors or , it just may cause them frustration altogether. And not to mention reduced workforce productivity because certainly when there is a problem or an outage , whatever was the task that you had originally assigned , the real jobs of these employees can't get completed.

Now one little aside to the increased employee churn that I I do wanna mention , and this is something that I hear often from executives , is that there is never a trivial , scenario in which often the outages may be noticed by , a c level executive or somebody in the c level executive's family. And , they will , you know , kind of make prompt phone calls to whoever is the head of the of the tech department and , you know , kind of demand that the issue be resolved.

And those are often , you know , kind of three alarm fires where everything needs to be dropped to investigate something. And often , the problem can't even easily be replicated.

And those are the scenarios that for developers who just wanna do their job and , you know , kind of do the bigger , programs and the goals that they were assigned to do when they have to step back and deal with these , these fire alarms , it's very , very frustrating. And this is definitely something that I hear IT organizations constantly grappling with.

So , so , you know , kind of you have this launching where you have the problems and the problems lead to , you know , kind of all sorts of of of the issues that are related to , both revenue as well as your ability to operate as a strong business. What about , what do you guys have , thoughts that you wanna add to share and add there ?

Howard Beader

21:26 - 22:13

Yeah. I mean , so very much , we're talking about experience and ensuring that continued experience and the resilience so that when there is a disruption , we can bring the business back very , very quickly , and we're ready to respond to any disruption , to minimize the MTTR.

You know , we've we've talked a lot about what the impact of these disruptions are. Maybe , Leo , can you tell us a little bit about maybe an organization that has leveraged Internet performance monitoring to help ?

Leo Vasiliou

22:13 - 25:23

I can. And what I wanna say , on this one is , coincidentally , it speaks to both customer experience and workforce experience , to how we open the presentation.

I just wanna say that's a pure coincidence. We , we did not plan it , not , not that , farsighted.

But , but what we've got here , large organization , extremely ravenous , that is to say high revenue. I don't I don't even know if revenous is a word.

We can't say , but , but think the type of organization that makes the front page if there's a large incident. Now what happened here was there was a major , Internet stack incident that prevented not only customers from being able to reach Transact , I e , you know , spend money , with their organization , but also the workforce , they themselves prevent it prevented the workforce from reaching in transaction and even worse , being able to find and fix , what was going on.

Right ? Hours and hours went by and eventually they started to to to figure it out. And , when they did , they said that can never ever happen again.

And so they went through their research phase , right , their own buyer journey , and they selected , CatchPoint. Now there are , a couple things I wanna just kinda call out here.

So , I always like to talk about things like you're trying to achieve a goal , an objective , a business outcome , whatever you wanna say there. You need certain capabilities to do so , and then you measure the success by , metrics.

Right ? So we need the ability to ensure performance. We need the ability to have as minimal time to repair as possible.

And here are some of the metrics , the quantifiable metrics that they themselves came to us and said , right , improve by 30%. Excuse me.

Reduce user reported issues by 20% and so on and so forth. What's very cool about this is after they got a handle on , the major pain , then they started to realize what additional capabilities were possible , and they started to discontinue our optimization journey for things that they didn't even know existed , with IPAM before.

So , I just kind of like to , to mention that because it's not a one and done type of thing. Right ? It's a continual journey because the expectations of your customers are also going to continually rise.

So that's how I like to marry those two. Right ? Continually rising expectations married with , continual , optimization.

So , Sucharita , back to you. We've talked about capabilities.

We've talked about outcomes. We've talked about some of the pain , some of the metrics.

Let's get to some of the grit here. Let's , let's talk about , additional dollars.

Sucharita Kodali

25:23 - 27:25

Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. And , this is one of the slides that I promised earlier , which is the cost of disruptions.

And in addition to the fact that there are so many disruptions , we have , the total cost. And this is essentially the monthly cost that the respondents to the survey , said that they experienced.

Now there is good news here , which is , as you recall , we did two tranches of the survey , and the numbers from 2023 to 2025 do appear to be declining when you see , the numbers less than 50,000 or between 50 and a hundred and even up to a half a million. Those numbers have gone up , while some of the million dollar plus , costs have gone down , which is definitely the direction that we wanna head in.

But still , you have the majority of problems being a 6 figure sum , across all of the respondents. So in the retail world and the brand world , that has consumers , these are companies that on a monthly basis are experiencing , more than a hundred thousand dollars in cost , which means that they're experiencing 7 figures , in cost due to these outages , annually.

And that is of what they've actually measured. There are that typically means revenue alone.

That's not considering things like the cost of higher employee churn or customer dissatisfaction , which may lead to lower lifetime value or other issues that are more difficult to quantify. This this typically tends to be just , you know , kind of our conversion rate was down or our website was down for a certain number of days and or hours and , you know , kind of what what is the average cadence of how much revenue that would have generated in a perfect state.

So , so these are really some of the things that , that we think are are absolutely important to , to consider. Anything to add , Howard ? Yeah.

Howard Beader

27:25 - 29:33

So , funny enough , I was , at dinner , a few weeks back with one of our large customers , retail customers that I'm sure many of us have , you know , taken a card into and filled up that complete part with giant boxes of all sorts of food and , you know , probably some some clothing and supplies. And we were talking about some of the findings from this report.

And he said to me , and his role is , basically , as head of observability for that organization. And he said to me , he's like , in my role , can I be the person that makes the why would I wanna be the person that makes the decision to not invest , in a solution like IBM to be able to respond to these types of disruptions quickly versus be the one responsible for these kinds of losses ? And it it really just has been something that that has stuck with me.

And he said it a whole lot more eloquently than I just did. But , you know , when you start looking at these dollars and for our larger organizations having a monthly loss of almost a million dollars a month , I mean , that's such a crazy amount of money.

Leo , what are I know you're gonna talk about one of our our customer stories , and , I'd like to jump there. But even that customer had announced , something pretty amazing.

Actually , I think you talk about it in just a little bit. But , anyway , I'll I'll let Saturita get back to there we go.

Sucharita Kodali

29:33 - 30:14

Yeah. And , there's another element too because we talk about explicit disruptions , and then there are other elements too , which is just snow slowness.

Right ? And you have latency. And , and and , arguably , if the website or your Internet pages are just slow , or your apps are slow , that's almost as deadly as being down altogether.

And this is absolutely something that the respondents agree with. And certainly , as even a user of the Internet , this is likely something that you agree with as well.

Leo , what , I I know that you have some some thoughts on this as well , particularly from your your client perspective.

Leo Vasiliou

30:14 - 34:05

Yeah. If I could just take a moment to say that , performance and performance analytics , you know , all those advanced crazy , maths of analyzing long tails , deviations , etcetera , are like an amateur hobby of mine.

The the I say that to say that performance is very near and dear to my heart. Right ? So it's not about straight outages , even slowdowns.

And if you don't believe me , next time you go through a drive through or try to place an order or walk up to our register , say , you can have a , you know , whatever iced coffee , remain silent and count Mississippi's and wait until , wait to see how long the person goes. I'm sorry.

Can I take your order right ? It probably won't be more than a second or two. Right ? But I I think I said it I think I alluded to it a moment ago.

Right ? The continual rise of user expectation , an evolution , if you will , which is one of the things we did with this refresh. The 2025 data is evolved from just talking about , outages.

And what it would be kind of silly , if you will to go to a business and just say , you need to make your stuff as fast as possible. Right ? So so I'm I'm trying to speak to like how to how do people adjust to this new paradigm.

Because making it as fast as possible means you'll never and you'll never know when you've actually , finished or reached a goal because , well , you need to make it faster. And then that's number one.

Number two , you can't be as fast as Google. Right ? You you're a rich ecommerce site delivering great shopping experiences.

As an example , you're you're never gonna be as fast as a a a white page from Google that just loads a search bar. So the main takeaway besides the evolution of disruptions and incidents also includes includes no list is be as fast at a minimum as your competition , if not faster than them because they are only a click away.

And we've already talked about this idea of website experience a couple of times , but that's , that's what I wanted to say is , like , a main takeaway here is , like , the evolution to think of performances and slowdowns , being just as bad as straight outages and how to think about it because you can't be as fast , as Google and you can't continually be like , I we need to be as fast as possible. Right ? You need to be realistic.

So I hope that's some practical , advice. And if I could just continue , you know , we have been talking about this Internet performance monitoring , IPM.

So , just to kind of actually give a little bit of an explanation of what , IPM's , observability scope is is , right , the the Internet stack. So , we're talking about visibility into the Internet stack to catch issues before they they impact your , business.

Here at CatchPoint , we've been pioneering this concept for years and the reason to me that it's so powerful is because what it does is it encapsulates and transitions from doing some of these monitoring in silos to a holistic frame for managing , digital , experiences. So you've got APM for your app stack , IPM for your Internet stack.

And so now that we've kind of given , a little bit about what it what the actual heck we're talking about here , Sucharita , Is this a discussion of growth in IPM ? What what what is the opportunity for our listeners ?

Sucharita Kodali

34:05 - 36:03

Right. So we have seen improvement between 2023 and 2025.

So , you'll see essentially all of the bad numbers , you know , kind of no IPM or testing on smaller systems. Those are going down and the good numbers , particularly across the full Internet stack and enterprise leveraging IPM going up.

So those are definitely things that this was almost a continuum , you know , kind of you would probably say least desirable on the left , most desirable on the right. But , but we're still not at the majority.

We still have , two thirds of all of the respondents saying that they don't have it everywhere on the staff that Leo described. You just have about half doing it on what they consider critical systems.

Now we didn't ask what was a critical system. You can probably imagine what they were.

But I would argue that every system in some way , shape , or form , depending on the time of day , depending on who it touches , can be very , very critical. And , having those points of failure of , say , something that you may not think is core , like videos on on a product detail page , may not seem that big of a problem if they aren't working.

But to a consumer who's about to purchase , it can be incredibly essential because we know that that's often a driver of conversion. So , so there there's still a lot of upside.

Things are improving , and I think that people understand , what the issues are , but , there's still an opportunity to improve and and really get to a standard where , this is is in the background and it ends up not even being , not even being as much of an area of concern because it's , you know , kind of you as an organization have it working smoothly and so well that that people don't even notice it. Howard , any any thoughts there ?

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Howard Beader

36:03 - 37:22

I mean , we are we are definitely seeing organizations , implement more and more , IPM , which is great to see. We're also , what we're seeing and , what Leo's gonna talk about , finally , on that next slide , is an large organization that really has standardized on both , APM and IPM together so that they have that complete visibility from the front end where the user is all the way back into the application.

And they've I really identified , some phenomenal KPIs out of that , such as reducing MTTI from three hours down to three minutes. They also announced , and there's definitely some stories on social that the last holiday season , they had zero downtime , which is amazing for the amount of sites that sit on the SAP ecommerce system.

Leo , I'll let you pick it up from there.

Leo Vasiliou

37:22 - 40:04

Good. You know , I just wanna take a second to say if , I'm so I'm so grateful that this organization gave us permission to use their logo and and name.

If you ever have an opportunity to hear , Martin tell the story in his own words , I highly recommend you do so because there's no way I could possibly do it justice. Having said that , I will do my darnedest.

So Howard , you kinda give an inference to , you know , this organization offering platforms to thousands and thousands and thousands and , of , you know , of of their customers ? And so , I'll put the old way or the prior way or , you know , the traditional way in quotation marks. I don't know the best word there.

But how they were doing it before was , they were taking an application centric approach to observability , instead of an experience centric approach that is , IPM , approach to , observability. And what happened when again , think think thousands and thousands of different versions of platforms for different organizations and however many hundreds and hundreds of countries around the globe.

When they were able to switch that perspective , invert the triangle , if you will , and focus on the experience , what that actually allowed them to do was then calibrate inward and reduce their spend. And and , if it didn't impact the experience , then they didn't need the same level of observability , you know , internally.

Right ? What's that , what's that Beyonce song ? Like , if you want it , should've put a ring on it. Right ? If if it doesn't affect the experience , then put a tear on it.

Right ? That's that's what they did. So for their critical apps that directly impacted the experience , they used IPM and to determine whether or not their internal components were also critical or noncritical , helping them , achieve improvement in these metrics , helping them reduce spend , and it's just a fantastic , wonderful , story.

And and , Leo , just to add , it's also a great , just human story because when the leader noted here took over , and was in charge , it was , a director , I believe. And he he basically took a solution that was struggling.

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Howard Beader

40:04 - 41:03

and turned it around , was able to improve the customer satisfaction dramatically , improve the overall experiences of the customer's customers , by pairing APM and IPM. And that resulted in him being promoted a couple of times.

And , so , you know , we all , you know , wanna do something unique and great in our roles so that we get recognized and get promoted. He was able to do this by building out this complete end to end solution.

So great story. You'll see , we also in the chat , we have an upcoming Fireside chat with Martin from SAP.

Peter , put it , the URL in the chat so that you can register for that pretty easily as well. Back to you , Satarita.

Sucharita Kodali

41:03 - 43:19

Yeah. So not all disruptions are created equally.

And you see that here in this data where you have certain types , like , particularly , SaaS applications that they tend to be much , much more difficult to identify , whereas website disruption's a little bit easier. You also I think , you know , kind of some some important pieces of data here.

One is , we're talking often about , you know , kind of the the digital experience , but , there are also , for most of these organizations , physical locations , and we have actually , a nontrivial percent of disruptions happening in physical locations , particularly at point of sale devices. And while it could be , you you know , kind of very visible when those disruptions happen because there may be an issue that is affecting a register or that is affecting a particular transaction , those , those are not great experiences from from a consumer standpoint.

So a question you may have is , well , why are some of these numbers differing and , you know , kind of what are what are some of the underlying characteristics here ? And I would I would argue that probably if we were to map the percent of companies from the previous slide that didn't have comprehensive IPM with those that have a challenge identifying , you you know , kind of or they have big challenges identifying these disruptions. They're probably somewhat correlated and having , having IPM likely leads to making them easier to identify or being more on the moderate challenge , part of the scale.

So , so these are these are definitely , challenges that , that every organization , every IT organization is grappling with. And , you you know , kind of certainly those at the top of the slide here tend to be more of the under the hood , challenges that that aren't always visible that , you know , kind of maybe further downstream , not immediate perhaps , but these are these are absolutely issues nonetheless.

Leo Vasiliou

43:19 - 44:35

One thing suits you to read , I just that kind you know , the the message within the data. So just kinda reading very challenging top to bottom SaaS app , ISP reachability , ecommerce APIs hosting , point of sale , and physical locations.

Third from the bottom , proprietary applications. So the message within the data is that I think people have a bit of a handle on the stuff that they control.

And the mindset is is kinda coming out of this denial that , even though the stuff is outside of your control , that it's still , is going to impact your customer's experience. And once you realize that to be true , then the capabilities provided by IPM become more relevant.

So saying it in a slightly different way , right , proprietary apps , the code you own versus those top choices , Right ? Third party SaaS apps , ISP reachability , third party APIs , hosting partners , those are the things that's that's not code you own. So , just kinda jumped , jumped out at me is to , to highlight the need for visibility that can be given by , IPM.

Sucharita Kodali

44:35 - 44:56

And right. And I think that this just continues to reinforce just the need , to have , the tools that can help an organization , anticipate , detect , and fix those problems immediately.

So this just continues to reinforce a lot of , what we talked about earlier.

Leo Vasiliou

44:56 - 45:04

I agree. I agree.

Did I mean , I almost I almost feel like that should be a % , but what are you gonna do ?

Sucharita Kodali

45:04 - 45:08

Well , they may be the ones that are already , you know , further along.

Leo Vasiliou

45:08 - 45:11

Oh , they they they go. That's a good point , though.

Howard Beader

45:11 - 45:15

Our our our existing customers make up the top.

Sucharita Kodali

45:15 - 46:11

Existing. Exactly.

So the just to to hammer home the point again , we saw some changes from between 2023 and now , and it is continuing to trend in in a in a good direction. You have the percent of people who say that they are experiencing positive business rewards and significant impact in a good way as a result of being able to identify , their Internet disruptions.

That figure is growing. And those that , are on , again , the left side , which is the side we wanna get away from , you know , those numbers are declining.

So things are trending absolutely in the right direction. It is , it is an essential part of of organizations in the retail and brand , brand manufacturer ecosystem.

And , and I think that all of this continues to reinforce that.

Leo Vasiliou

46:11 - 46:46

Agreed. Agreed.

And , I don't know about you , Howard. Sucharita , I'm looking at the clock.

Looks like we're coming up on eleven minutes. So , I just wanna jump to this slide here.

And then if we have time , maybe we can talk about a couple of other , stories or see if there are any additional questions. But , Sutorita , maybe just , I I know there's a couple of things I wanna speak to here , but , maybe if you or Howard , if you wanna start us off on kinda wrapping up , like , things to think about , like , a checklist.

What what do people do in this session ?

Sucharita Kodali

46:46 - 50:37

So I think that one of the things that a lot of , a lot of execs tech execs face is getting enough , either budget for some of these critical tools or getting enough support from their board or from other c level several c level executives in in advocating for this. So , the kinds of things that we have seen work are first and foremost to maintain detailed records , and estimate your own cost of your disruption.

And the more that you can do beyond just , okay. This site was down for this period of time , and generally , we generate x number of dollars and multiplying that out , thinking through also things like lifetime value , thinking through the cost of employee churn.

The more comprehensive you can consider those costs , the more that you will make , a better business case for for making sure that you have budgeting for this. Lobby for IPM solutions when disruptions are large and fresh in stakeholder minds.

This is , you know , kind of nobody wishes for these disruptions , but as we saw on some of those earlier slides , they are inevitable. They are daily.

And when there is a larger one or when there is a c level executive or their family , that calls it out to your tech team , make that , turn it around to an opportunity to to get increased budgeting for these solutions. Rally allies through your company.

There are no doubt people who are equally frustrated whenever there is downtime , whenever there are disruptions. And the more that you can get them on your side and say that this is the outcome that we would like to have , this is the solution that we can use to create to get the outcome that we want , the better.

It's just , always more helpful. I I certainly see that when when a group of employees are able to make a case versus just one individual , and prioritize these tools during budgeting cycles.

And , you know , kind of I I know that in in tech organizations , there's often a distinction between the keep the lights on work and innovation investments. This is absolutely something that needs to go under keep the lights on , and , you know , kind of on a list of to dos , there is every reason to prioritize this and make this one of the top ones.

Incorporate ROI from productivity improvements , into any type of a cost benefit analysis. You know , kind of sometimes these productivity improvements are , you know , kind of just seen as invisible in many ways , especially when they work smoothly.

But the more that you can consider and push them to be incorporated into , you know , kind of essentially the ROI of virtually , every investment that can be a positive thing. Seek out case studies with similar users.

I know that in , in the retail world , everybody wants to know what their direct competition is doing. And if you have , great examples from your competition having deployed something like this or even in the contrary , like , an outage that your competitor may have experienced , These are all things that can be very , very compelling to a c suite , and then also establish , experience level objectives.

So CX , customer experience , is something that we touched upon. I think that a lot of c level executives want revenue , but yet customer experience is highly , highly correlated to retention , to lower churn and ultimately higher lifetime value and bad experiences , and ultimately Internet disruptions , create that churn , which is that bad customer experience.

So , consider that as well. These are these are things that , that are incredibly important and and valuable and and are becoming more commonplace in c suites.

Leo Vasiliou

50:37 - 52:42

And , Sucharita , the as I'm rereading , I don't wanna make a bad assumption and assume people , you know , can truly appreciate the idea of an experience level objective. So if I could just take a second , the just for sake of time , I hope people understand the idea of , like , a basic service level inject objective.

So a service level objective says , hey. Our internal API must respond to requests , you know , five nines.

Whereas an experience level objective says , customers need to be able to go through , the purchase cycle , you know , in four seconds , ninety nine point nine whatever percent of the time. Right ? It's a complete shift to an experience based perspective.

And and the reason that's so important is is if you kind of go back and look at some of the previous lines is is it's way more than just the code you own that can impact that experience. So that's kind of the caveat there is when you shift , it's way more than just what you own.

It's all those third parties. It's all those reach ISP connectivity , reachability components that are another , opportunity for failure.

And the other thing that an experience level objective does is by definition , it includes performance , which is a critical evolutionary talk track from this data from two years ago. Right ? Beyond just can you make a purchase , it's can you make a purchase in whatever five seconds.

And going back to what I was saying earlier is don't be as fast as you can be. Set an objective.

That objective may be based on how fast your competition is. It may be based on some other business , contributing factor.

But then when you set that objective , then you'll know whether or not you've , reached that , reached that goal. So that's why it's so , so critical.

Howard , any closing thoughts ?

Howard Beader

52:42 - 53:07

Yeah. No.

Great thoughts. Great summary.

Thank you both. What I'd like to do is , if anybody has any questions , feel free to pop them in the q and a or the chat.

Situated , there is one question asking if you can repeat the global retail figures.

Sucharita Kodali

53:07 - 53:21

Yeah. That was $25,000,000,000,000 for global retail and 5,000,000,000,000 for ecommerce , of which , 3,000,000,000,000 in ecommerce was transacted in The US and China.

Howard Beader

53:21 - 54:11

Awesome. Thank you.

And I've also just opened the poll. If you can all , take a look at the poll and if there's , anything that we can help you with , we're more than happy to do so.

Other than that , Susharita , thank you so much for spending the time with us.

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