As part of the Digital Experience Monitoring - Telco's Next Gamechanger' campaign, The Fast Mode spoke to Jason Hatch who is the Senior Director of Product Management, Web Experience, Asia Pacific & Japan at Akamai on how DEM is shaping enterprise IT monitoring as the adoption of Cloud and SaaS becomes increasingly widespread, and as the 'new normal' introduced by the recent pandemic creates new security vulnerabilities and performance implications. The interview is as follows:
Why is there so much interest in DEM?
DEM has always been important due to so much of everyday life and work moving online. Especially in the times of COVID-19 it has now become more critical. Also, with the importance of mobile applications as well as web properties, this has become vital to have a comprehensive view across all digital properties. Mobile app and web performance are very nuanced and sometimes unintuitive. It is important to not just optimise digital properties, but to measure the impact of those changes to the experience of using the site. Correlating changes in your app or web site with business metrics such as conversion rate is a powerful way of growing business online.
Jason Hatch, Senior Director Product Management, Web Experience, Asia Pacific & Japan, Akamai
How does DEM change existing enterprise IT and application performance monitoring?
DEM changes existing performance monitoring because it provides very detailed and near real time visibility into the user experience. This means that negative impact of outages or changes can be visible and reacted to very quickly to avoid negative business outcomes. Positive results of optimisations can also be seen and even the impact of changes can be predicted before implementation to validate the value of that change. This is the case with our customer Hulu who saw the benefits of DEM through their use of our Real User Monitoring (RUM) solution, mPulse. The solution allowed them to determine the viewing and image qualities of their videos as well as the performance impact of any site changes it was considering.
What are your key solutions for DEM?
Akamai’s mPulse, which provides Real User Monitoring (RUM), provides monitoring and insights, giving businesses granular visibility into how end users perceive performance, and take action against third-party resources that might be slowing them down.
Another solution we have is CloudTest. The solution is the largest, highly scalable, global load testing platform that allows businesses to quickly prove if their digital property can handle peak loads.
What are some of the challenges you foresee in getting more enterprises to adopt DEM?
There are several challenges. Firstly, IT teams and other business units need to collaborate. DEM provides unified views of a business’ digital performance. However, organisations often work in silos. To experience the benefits that DEM brings, departmental siloes need to be broken down and teams need to come together for the common goal of improving customer experiences. Secondly, DEM provides granular visibility into performance. This means monitoring both the good, the bad and the ugly. For organisations with resource constrains, this might pose a challenge for representatives to raise any issues they foresee.
