“Application performance is critical”, said Rollo du Pré, Chief Architect at i-nexus. “We continually track the user experience of our application to ensure that we tune performance to meet evolving needs. We are an agile SaaS business, frequently releasing new features every few weeks. To deliver high quality performance it has to be proven throughout development and continuously monitored in production.”i-nexus supports business execution processes with their unique and rapidly growing SaaS platform, enabling organisations to translate business goals into actions, plan and drive implementation of those actions and subsequently track the achievement of goals.

"From the design of their solutions through to delivery and support, i-nexus strive to deliver an unparalleled service. As part of their ongoing efforts to drive continuous improvements in the technology platform, i-nexus have selected the combination of AppDynamics and DBTuna to continue to deliver responsiveness and performance to i-nexus users."

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RM Education is a global education technology business ... ‘supporting teachers to teach and learners to learn’. In addition to classroom resources and school technologies, RM also provides collaborative learning platforms.

The RM Learning Platform is a web application specifically designed for schools with a comprehensive set of modules and web services. It is designed to fulfil many tasks of teaching and learning for students, teacher and parents.  Functionality includes:

• Providing personalised online spaces for students and staff.
• Integration with your school's management information systems.
• Create and share engaging resources, and set and mark assignments on line.
• Communication and collaboration tools

COWI is a Danish consulting group with a team of 6,000 (employees working together with external partners) coordinating 15,000 projects on behalf of customers around the world. Slick communication is a fundamental requirement.

Using SharePoint as a primary communications management tool, the business runs a COWIportal intranet site worldwide. COWI has recently worked with Application Performance to integrate Aptimize SharePoint Accelerator to accelerate intranet performance, and WebTuna for real end-user performance monitoring.

We spoke with Frederik Bonde Nielsen, COWI’s Chief Specialist, Portal, to gain a better understanding of the issues that sparked interest in these innovative technologies and the benefits they are already seeing.

Based on an interview with Andrew Mulholland, Application Delivery and Support Manager, Betfair

Since pioneering the concept of the betting exchange in 1999, Betfair has grown rapidly to become one of the largest online betting companies in the world with more than three million customers.

To put the scale of Betfair’s operation into context, it processes more than five million transactions (such as placing a bet) every day and handles over seven billion page views every week, which is more than all European stock exchanges combined. Plus, Betfair needs to be available 24 hours a day 7 days a week – which is no small challenge.

Betfair’s growth has relied on both innovative products and the ability to provide a great – and fast – online experience for its users, with 99.9% of bets completed in under a second – so performance is taken very seriously.

Application Performance has a long-standing relationship with Betfair and was pleased to introduce AppDynamics technology as an innovative new way to safeguard and improve website performance for end users, by optimising the many underlying Java application servers and how they interact with back end databases.

Owner of market-leading consumer brands ‘Aptimized’ 

Aptimize, the company dedicated to accelerating websites and intranets, today announced that PZ Cussons the UK-based owner of brands such as Carex, Imperial Leather, Original Source and Charles Worthington has chosen its Web optimization technology for its new global intranet project.

Operating globally, in Africa, Europe and the Far East, PZ Cussons places a high value on its corporate culture and employees across its organization are encouraged to live by its ‘CAN DO’ values each day. These values are Courage, Accountability, Networking, Drive and Oneness.

Acting as a hub of Group-wide communications and collaboration, the homepage on its desk-based employees’ PCs is a Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 intranet which allows them to work in shared workspaces and read news items from across the Group on a range of topics such as people, brands and CSR.

40-50% ‘out of the box' browser speed improvement

Corporate websites and intranets have become both the shop windows and the in-house magazines for many companies, highlighting their public offerings as well as illustrating their brand values internally to employees. Building these sites into compelling portals requires mastery of several fast-changing technologies, being sensitive to the culture of the site's audience and a focus on crisp, clear communications. 

Just as the performance of e-commerce web sites is critical to private sector businesses, web site performance is crucial to the proper functioning of school educational web sites.

With this in mind, Research Machines (RM), one of the largest education ICT providers, has deployed Aptimize’s Website Accelerator (WAX) to provide faster content to users regardless of their network speed or desktop hardware.

Teachers use RM’s platform to deliver online content to pupils during lessons, and pupils use the platform to submit homework or collaborate with other pupils. In addition, parents access the portal to look at the attainment levels, attendance and behaviour of their children at school. The platform is based on Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 collaboration and content management platform. Brian Gibson, technical architect for the RM platform, said: “RM’s Learning Platform serves a demanding audience, and optimising response times is important for avoiding frustration or even disturbance in the classroom. “RM has an account for every parent, teacher and school in Scotland. It also has platforms serving the rest of the UK, which hosts 2.2 million user accounts. Gibson explained that the company also has platforms in Australia and is building one in the US.

PCA has several bespoke MySQL-backed and third party Microsoft SQL-Server-backed applications serving the needs of the College and its customers. Many of these applications are critical for the running of the College during business hours. Increasingly, web-based customer applications require the systems to be available 24x7. Therefore, when regular unexplainable downtime began to be experienced, a tool was needed to both help identify the problem and to help prevent these types of issues in the future.

About Plymouth College of Art

As one of only four remaining further and higher specialist art and design colleges in the country, the College provides a role locally, regionally, nationally and internationally in providing excellence in Art and Design education and training. The College is part of the National Arts Learning Network with links to other specialist Art and Design higher education institutions.

“We really appreciated AP’s willingness to listen to our needs and suggest a solution designed to meet our priorities. This approach was in contrast to other larger vendors who were more interested in telling us about their products capabilities.”

Keeping ahead of the performance curve

In early 2007 having rolled out the BRIDGE applications to AUTOGLASS in the UK, BELRON decided to look for a performance and availability solution that would significantly improve the visibility of how the Oracle E-Business and Remedy applications were performing. Nick Burton, Global BRIDGE IT Operations Manager said “We needed a solution that provided us with a detailed view of resource usage within our application servers and a reliable view of our actual end-users experience.”

“Our aim was to continually track performance against acceptable baselines, improve our chances of solving problems before they impacted end users as well as moving from user gut feel about performance to measurements that everyone could believe in.

The world’s leading betting exchange, Betfair, has selected DBTuna to help guarantee Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL database performance in production, performance testing and development environments.

Betfair, the world’s leading online betting exchange, spent a considerable time searching for a database performance monitoring solutions before finally coming down on the side of DBTuna. They had some pretty specialised needs, dictated by their incredibly busy databases, and use of multiple database technologies. These ruled out many of the key players, whose solutions just couldn’t keep up with the demands of Betfair’s systems.

Betfair process more than 5 million database transactions per day, and expect their database e monitoring to resolve to the finest granularity, without any significant overhead, which they just couldn’t afford.  Find out more about how they came to choose DBTuna, and why it has now become such an invaluable tool to them.