There was a time when the word “Security” spelt the biggest nightmare for owners of large networks. To keep the record straight, it still is one of the largest nightmares of network owners. But as more applications started running over networks that seemed to be getting more complicated by the day, a new issue seemed to occupy the worry-lines on their foreheads – an issue that was even more critical than security, given the immediate impact it had on user experience: The issue of seamless Application Delivery to the customer.

Now, this story is not new. All of us have experienced those occasional frustrating moments when the mail server crashes just as you are about send an important mail, or those nail-biting moments when a site freezes when you are just about to book that last movie ticket online.

Well, blame it all on lousy Application Delivery!

Increasing customer traffic, coupled with complex applications running over multiple servers located across geographies have made seamless delivery of application an art to be perfected.

And to master this art of seamless Application Delivery, one needs the power of information-information about what’s happening over your network- what applications are running on your network, what is the frequency of requests, where are the traffic bottlenecks, what is the optimal way to route traffic, what were the recent changes done on your network, who made the changes….and the list goes on.

It wouldn’t take an application delivery expert to figure that this kind of data can only be gotten from a sea of real-time data, streaming out of applications and devices running on your huge network.

So, this is about collecting data from Applications and Network Devices in real-time, right?
Not exactly. Collecting data is only the tip of the iceberg. Once you have this sea of data, the real challenge lies in running intelligent analytics over them and coming up with actionable insights. Data is only as good as the story it tells.

As your network grows both, in number of applications and the number of devices running on it, you increasingly start to feel the pain of not having a one-stop dash board to make sense of all that is happening on your network. You feel the need for a solution that would let you see what is happening on you network, sitting at one place

Ah! So it’s a one-stop dashboard that would help you solve your application delivery problems, you say. Yes, but if only it were as simple as it sounded. The effectiveness of an Application Delivery Analytics dashboard lies in displaying the kind of information that would help you manage your applications and network. In other words, what is the information that you would like to see on your dashboard? That’s the real challenge for an “Application Delivery Analytics” solution provider.

At Payoda, we constantly strive to identify the most important issues that plague Application owners and Network Administrators on large corporate networks. Here are some that we have identified so far:

•   Visibility

• Real-time visibility of the entire network topology
• Real-time visibility of data traffic running through each device/application.

•   Application traffic routing

• Enable and disable traffic through specified Servers and Data Centers
• Graceful routing: allowing existing sessions to complete before closing down a route.
• Forced Server shut downs and startups

•   Historic trending & significant events correlation

• Historic trends for Application/ device KPIs (CPU usage, traffic throughput, etc)
• Compare statistics across applications and data centers for during significant events

•   Application status and Threshold alerts

• Get notified on significant events and thresholds (such as server down, traffic disable, threshold violations, etc)

•   Housekeeping: User authentication, Access controls and Auditing of user actions

•   Troubleshooting Application Delivery bottlenecks in quick time

• Centralized visibility and control of all applications and devices. This makes diagnosis and troubleshooting far easier.

Whatever the Application Delivery needs be, Application Delivery Analytic solutions such as AppViewX can help you better manage your applications and network to deliver a superior application experience to your customers, consistently and cost effectively.

It is still October and not even Halloween yet, but the holiday season fever has started already. You can feel that pulse across the internet now.  Most of the e-tailers bake their largest piece of pie during this season. It sounds interesting when we say we can make up for about 60 – 70% of the annual revenue during the holiday season that spans for just three months.  Then, why not just market vigorously during the holiday season rather than slogging throughout the year.

But the fact is, a lot of homework has to be done by the e-tailer to face the Holiday season. Let’s discuss few of the MUST DO activities to ensure that you have a profitable Holiday Season this year.

SEO for all product landing pages  – Though , the Google algorithm update changes a lot of things, but still there is so much you can do to ensure a profitable holiday season. Complete all on page and off page optimization tasks well before the start of holiday season. After putting in lot of money & effort in marketing your brand & products, you don’t want the visitor to complain that your Contact Us page returned a 401 Page not found error. Use appropriate call to action on the banners, update the content on the website, check for broken links, out of stock products etc.  Sometimes, small things that we miss just get things messy.

Build an ultra strong Holiday keyword list  –  Identify the list of maximum revenue generating keywords and experiment them on all different match types well ahead of the season. Use Google Trends to study the timeline & trend for each keyword, identify the best time during the day and day part accordingly. These trends might just turn upside down during the Holiday season with rising average cpc’s driving you crazy, but this piece of homework still helps..

Target your high revenue generating Clients – Dig out your customer database and identify the most revenue generating customers & repeat customers.  Build your target customer list and study their shopping cart and see what more you can offer them. These customers like your website & have a high probability of visiting your website again. But please be informed that, other competitors would be bombarding them with lucrative offers during this season. So for your website to be on top of their mind, you definitely have to go the extra mile!!

Bundle your products & give out attractive offers – Study the shopping cart of your customers and identify the products that can be cross sold. Bundle them as a package and call it a GIFT. Be genuine and offer a discount/free shipping etc on the packaged product. Bundle your product and price them carefully.  At the end of the day, you definitely want to increase the average revenue generated per customer. Many marketing gurus can suggest different bundling ideas, product & pricing ideas. But remember, they can only offer you some extra light to work on. No one knows your customer better than you and to make things complex, each customer is different

Run Creative Contests – Run creative contests that will cut through the clutter and reach out to your customer . Just to mention, last year Jelly Belly Inc ran a campaign called the “Cup Cake Challenge” with  a grand prize of $10,000 for the winner. The visitor can login & design their own cup cake by dragging and dropping the design items given there. This resulted in a whopping increase in the website traffic and the purchases from the store.  I could not stop myself from participating in the contest and I did make a purchase later from Jelly Belly 

Build your promotion calendar well ahead – The research reports say that on an average retailers began their 2010 holiday campaigns 69 days before Christmas that is two days earlier than 2009 holiday season and 11 days earlier than the 2007 holiday season. Plan your promotions early and customize each promotion for the key shopping days. Cyber Monday became the first –ever $1 billion online shopping day.  Additionally you can target offers around Green Monday , Black Friday, Thanksgiving day, Free Shipping day, Christmas and days before and after each of these key shopping days.

Guide your customer, Help your customer, Make things easier for them – This is the season when people think a lot about gift ideas. Some are meticulous enough to plan their purchase well ahead , but some still do last minute shopping. You need to help them choose the best gift for their loved ones.  All you need to do is to be genuine and reach out to them with empathy. You can put up the list of best selling products on your home page. For instance, the Amazing Clubs put up the top 5 customer recommendations right on the home page . They also gave out Free Shipping with Every gift every day offer. This made it easy for the customers to browse through and make a purchase right there.

Have you gone mobile ???  – Most of the e-tailors are in a mindset that their standard website can serve for their mobile customers as well. But that’s not true. When a person is visiting your site via a smart phone or any other mobile device, he is someone who is looking for a quickest solution to make an easy purchase. He doesn’t want to read the long Corporate information & Case studies on your website and obviously, doesn’t want to fill out 10 different forms there. The last year statistics shows that Ebay reported 400% increase in sales on Dec 12^th compared to the start of the month and due to this sudden increase, Ebay termed it as the “Mobile Sunday “. This behavior is also validated by the data published by Google that says, about 44% of the searches for the last minute holiday gifts will be mobile. In case you haven’t started yet, better start now !!!

Keep a tap on your metrics & trend:  Analyze your previous Holiday sales trend and identify your goal for this holiday season. Once you kick start your holiday campaign, keep a tight check on the metrics that matter most to you.  Some of them can be your average CPC, Website clicks to conversion rate, Revenue per customer, Lost Impression Share and  Average Order value.

Design a variety of landing pages & banners – The entire internet space turns very colorful during the Holiday season, especially during Christmas with splashes of White, Red and Green all over. You needn’t  be too splashy, but it is always good to personalize the website pages for the season. Do not make it look too cluttered with lot of images , that will confuse the customer. Instead, use a fair mix of colors with enough white space to facilitate an easy read.  The trend keeps changing dynamically during the holiday season and it is the worst time to test landing pages, because even if you lose a day’s sale you are losing a lot more than a peanut.  So put in all your best practices and design appropriate landing pages for every product /offer. Also , design few alternative banners, so that if one doesn’t work, you can  use an alternate banner immediately without a time lag.

Build your Email list now – By now, you should have built your customer email list. Do not spam their inboxes with too many mails. If you do so, you are running a huge risk of losing the customer right after your second email. All the email marketing rules holds good during the holiday season as well. Review last year email campaigns and see what worked best, which are the highest response dates and adopt those ideas in this year’s plan.  Send out product offer mails more frequently during this season. Do not forget to thank your customer for the purchase and wish them a happy holiday

There is just lot more that one can do to ensure a very profitable and successful holiday season. We can talk for hours about it , but to make it short, guess we have touched upon the most important things. Do let us know your comments and your holiday season experience…

Wishing you all a very great and successful holiday season ahead