Canoe.ca Improves its Online Business Using Gomez’s Web Performance Load Testing and Monitoring Solutions

Leading Canadian Interactive Media Provider is Using Gomez to Measure Performance and Availability of Multiple Web Properties for Millions of End-users

DETROIT June 22, 2009

Gomez, Inc. (www.gomez.com), the leader in Web application experience management, today announced that Canoe.ca, one of Canada's leading interactive media companies, has been optimizing the performance of its Web properties using load testing and Web performance management solutions from Gomez.

With more than 200 Web properties and over 100 third party partners providing dynamic content, tools and functionality to its Websites, Canoe.ca is a highly-rich and complex e-commerce, news and service provider attracting more than eight million unique visitors every month. The company understands that its users' online experiences are critical to brand, revenue-generation and customer satisfaction and that Web performance problems directly impact their bottom line. Driven by opportunities to expand services in the Canadian marketplace, Canoe.ca needed to ensure that its most important Web pages and transactions performed properly for all users.

Canoe.ca chose Gomez because of its unique ability to test from the "outside-in" — from the end-user's perspective — using its comprehensive global testing network of hundreds of Internet Backbone locations, over 80,000 end-user measurement points on the Gomez Last Mile℠ network, and millions of Canoe.ca's real end-users' browsers.

Canoe.ca first conducted an on-demand Web performance load test as it prepared to receive significant volumes of Web traffic for online voting for the popular French 'Star Academie' reality TV show. The test helped Canoe.ca understand how peak load might impact its end-users' Web experiences and whether any issues might need addressing prior to going live. Unlike traditional load testing services, Gomez's on-demand solution creates a "real-world" load that combines volume from the cloud with load from a geographic mix of "Last Mile" end-user PCs, ISPs and connection speeds. This approach is the only way to test the full Web 2.0 application delivery chain all the way from the end-user's desktop to the data center. Thanks to the load test, Canoe.ca was assured that its site was ready to deliver quality Web experiences even during peak online voting periods.

Then, Canoe.ca put in place a comprehensive Web performance management strategy to provide a 360 degree view of their Web experience and help find, diagnose and fix performance issues before they impacted end-users. This includes:

  • Testing the operational health and availability of its systems using active monitoring from Internet backbone nodes across the U.S. and Canada.
  • Monitoring Web performance at the 'edge' of the Internet using end-user desktop measurement points on the Gomez Last Mile network within Canada. This helps Canoe.ca identify the cause of any localized Web performance issues impacting users on high and low-broadband connections and on different consumer-grade ISPs.
  • Measuring the actual Web experiences of customers accessing its sites using Gomez's real-user monitoring solution to understand how technical performance issues affect end-users' behaviors in real-time. This service measures Web performance directly within a user's Web browser as they visit and interact with a Web page, helping Canoe.ca track whether performance issues are impacting certain segments of users — for example by geography, ISP or browser type — and prioritize troubleshooting.

"As the leading Canadian media destination, the Web is vital to our business strategy. Investing in a solution that helps us protects both online revenue and brand sustains our competitive edge," said Stephen Evan, CTO of Canoe.ca. "The insights that Gomez's solutions provide help us clearly understand the Web experiences we deliver to customers and swiftly make improvements if there are problems. And the improved technical performance of our Web sites ultimately drives the improved health of our online business."

"With a complex Web and rich application infrastructure that relies on a great deal of third party content and functionality, there's a lot that could go wrong when all components of each Web page assemble and render for the first time on a customer's computer," said Matt Poepsel, VP of performance strategies at Gomez. "Canoe.ca is wise to comprehensively measure Web performance from its customers' perspective using a mix of synthetic and real user monitoring. It's a powerful combination that exposes Web performance problems as they happen and are being experienced by end-users, identifies their root cause and offers a course of action. These insights help companies like Canoe.ca speed time to resolution and drive better business performance from the Web."

About Compuware Gomez

Gomez, the Web performance division of Compuware, provides the industry's leading solutions for optimizing the performance, availability, and quality of Web and mobile applications. The on-demand Gomez platform integrates solutions for Web load testing, Web performance management, Web cross-browser testing, and Web performance business analysis that test and measure Web and mobile applications from the "outside-in" — across all users, browsers, devices, and geographies — using a global network of over 100,000 locations. When combined with Compuware Vantage, Gomez offers the industry's only solution for optimizing application performance across the Enterprise and the Internet. Over 3,000 customers worldwide, ranging from small companies to large enterprises — including 12 of the top 20 most visited US Web sites — use Gomez solutions to increase revenue, build brand loyalty and decrease costs.

Follow us on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/Gomez_Inc and http://twitter.com/compuware.

Compuware Corporation

Founded in 1973, Compuware provides software, experts and best practices to ensure applications work well and deliver business value. Compuware solutions optimize application performance across the Enterprise and the Internet for leading organizations around the world, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited U.S. web sites. Learn more at: http://www.compuware.com.

Press Contact

Brenda Menard
Gomez Division, Compuware Corporation
(781) 698-2393
bmenard@gomez.com