Forgive me for stating the obvious, but web applications are a critical part of global business in 2011. I see no alternative other than more dependence by companies everywhere on web software and Internet infrastructure. In my opinion, all business trend data predicts greater overall web usage, more complex application architectures, and tremendous spikes in extreme traffic volumes.

Critical Applications, Yet They Aren’t Getting the Investment Needed

ComputerWorld last week made a definitive statement regarding the critical nature of web applications:

Those who are unprepared are vulnerable to service outages, customer dissatisfaction and trading losses – and often when it hurts the most. Successful businesses understand the need to assure service and application availability if they want to retain customers, deliver excellent service and take maximum advantage of the opportunity their market offers.
This is not a theoretical problem – just look at the recent challenges for the London 2012 Olympics andTicketmaster. Just when everyone wants to do business with you, you’re not available.

The London Olympics site was overwhelmed by high demand for tickets and many buyers received the message, “We are experiencing high demand. You will be automatically directed to the page requested as soon as it becomes available. Thank you for your patience.”

That’s a failure even if the representatives of the site said it had not crashed. Performance failure…pure and simple for the whole world to see.

Examples of performance failure like this seem to occur weekly, if not daily, somewhere in the global business universe of websites.

Transformative Moment? When Global Retailers Fail!

Recently Target.com crashed under extreme user volume. They cut a deal with a designer line of knitware (Missoni) and promoted a special sale on the morning before products were sold in stores. By 8:00 a.m. EDT, the site was crashing. The Boston Globe went so far as to say:

”…the Missoni mess could be a transformative moment in the relatively brief history of e-commerce. Retail analysts say it shows that even though online shopping has made major strides since Victoria Secret’s website famously faltered during a 1999 webcast, companies still may not always have the technological muscle to meet consumer demand for such frenzied promotions.”

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