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Wal-Mart Grabs Shoppers, But Web Traffic Down

11.28.09

by Mark Hachman

Traffic to the top U.S. retailer Web sites dropped on Thanksgiving Day, although Wal-Mart's Web site once again emerged as the big winner.

According to Akamai, traffic to the top 500 retailer Web sites dropped by 15 percent versus Thanksgiving Day 2008, with global traffic peaking at 5,732,966 visitors per minute at about 2 PM EST. Within North America, traffic peaked at about 10 PM EST, with an average of 4,095,242 visitors per minute.

Walmart.com received the highest share, with 15 percent of all visits, followed by Amazon.com (12.41 percent), Bestbuy.com (6.22 percent), Target.com (5.63 percent) and Sears.com (3.78 percent). All of the sites received a boost from other, Black Friday-themed sites, which sent traffic the retailers' way. Walmart.com received the most, at 4.62 percent; BestBuy.com and Target.com received the second and third-most traffic, at 3.07 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively.

Of the top 20 sites, Old Navy saw the largest increase in visits compared to 2008 with a 59 percent increase; Amazon saw a 30 percent increase and Target received a 28 percent boost, according to Experian Hitwise.

One non-retailing site that saw a boost was Facebook, where site visits climbed 671 percent from a year ago, according to Experian Hitwise. That represents traffic from Black Friday shoppers, who then jumped to Facebook, according to Matt Tatham, a spokesman for Experian Hitwise. [More]

posted by: gqpartner

SaaS Promoted By Bad Economy

IT Jungle:

SaaS Sales Up Smartly Despite (or Because Of) the Economy

Published: November 30, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Buying applications and raw infrastructure as a service is getting a push globally thanks to the maturation of software and networking technologies (particularly improved Web interfaces and low-cost, high-speed Internet access) and a pull from companies who are trying to cut costs and only pay for what they use.

According to a recent report from Gartner, the company's market wizards expect that global software as a service (SaaS) sales will grow by 17.7 percent this year, to $7.5 billion. This market is a lot more than just Salesforce.com.

"The adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets," explained Sharon Mertz, a research director at Gartner who put together the SaaS sales projections. "The composition of the worldwide SaaS landscape is evolving as vendors continue to extend regionally, increase penetration within existing accounts and 'greenfield' opportunities, and offer more vertical-specific solutions as part of their service portfolio or through partners."

The push in conjunction with partners has apparently been a key factor in driving growth. It is a lot easier for a software vendor and its partners to push a service with a set cost per user than a solution with a big upfront cost and financing headaches. No one wants to use cash for anything if they can avoid it.

The biggest chunk of SaaS sales is the content, communications, and collaboration segment, as you can see from the table below, followed up by customer relationship management software.

2008 2009 Change Content, Communications and Collaboration $2,143 $2,573 20.1% Office Suites $56 $68 21.4% Digital Content Creation $44 $62 40.9% Customer Relationship Management $1,872 $2,281 21.8% Enterprise Resource Planning $1,176 $1,239 5.4% Supply Chain Management $710 $826 16.3% Other Application Software $387 $472 22.0% Total SaaS Enterprise Software $6,388 $7,521 17.7%

[Read more]

posted by: gqpartner

Is eBay Platform Robust Enought To Handle Surge in Traffic?

Nice point contrasting eBay's spin about their outage, hard data, and the absence of seemingly obvious questions on the part of the media.

AuctionBytes on eBay spin:

Monday Morning Quarterback: eBay's Spin on Search Outage
 By: David Steiner Mon Nov 23 2009 14:17:06

"The unanticipated technical issue resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. EBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago. The company said the technical issue, once identified, was easily fixed."

-- eBay

AuctionBytes asks good questions:

Why would eBay go with this response, which is so quantifiable? It's the type of stuff that makes sports talk shows so popular on Mondays - because 20/20 hindsight is always the clearest.

Never mind that on Medved and PowerSellersUnite auction counts, there is barely a blip in the number of listings that came in over the past few days. But, 2 weeks before the supposed surge to 200 million listings, eBay was already stating it had close to 200 million live product listings. (See this eBay press release.)

Evidently, much of the mainstream press was willing to accept eBay's answer at face value, instead of asking some relevant questions like:
    •    "How many listings came in on the weekend that caused the outage?"
    •    "Isn't eBay's platform robust enough to handle a surge in traffic and/or listings?"
    •    "It's November 21 - why are sellers still "ramping up" for the holiday season?"
    •    "You claimed 200 million listings in early November, it's still at 200 million - where's the surge?" [Read more]

posted by: gqpartner

YouTuve Consumes 7.8% of Corporate Bandwith

TECHWORLD:

YouTube and Facebook eating company bandwidth

Popular apps are bandwidth hogs, finds survey.

By John E. Dunn | Techworld | Published: 13:47 GMT, 30 November 09

What are enterprise networks used for? According to a new traffic analysis the answer is, increasingly, to let employees spend work time visiting websites such as YouTube and Facebook.

Judging by figures uncovered by managed network provider Network Box between July and November of 2009, this is no sensational interpretation. Surveying 19 billion URLs visited by 30,000 end users from among the company's customer base, the top application turned out to be YouTube, which consumed an astounding 7.8 percent of all available bandwidth.

Behind this came Facebook with 4.4 percent, Yimg (Yahoo's image search) at 2.8 percent, and Google on 2.7 percent. Uncomfortably perhaps, Microsoft updates alone managed to eat 3.8 percent of bandwidth. [More]

posted by: gqpartner

EBay’s Weekend Crash May Have Cost Merchants 80% of Revenue

Bloomberg:

By Joseph Galante

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- EBay Inc.’s Web-site crash on Nov. 21 may have cost merchants about 80 percent of their sales for the day, according to ChannelAdvisor Corp., which helps retailers sell on the site.

Shoppers searching the site for products such as Apple Inc.’s iPod got a blank page or an error message that the site was unable to run the requested search. EBay may face more disruptions as listing volumes peak during the holiday shopping season, ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo said in an interview.

EBay’s search engine was down for most of the day after a worker made a change to the system, causing it to crash, said John Pluhowski, a spokesman for the San Jose, California-based company. The technical issue “resulted from a surge in live listings” ahead of the holiday season, EBay said.

“It’s only going to get worse, which makes us concerned,” said Wingo, whose Morrisville, North Carolina-based company helps about 3,000 merchants sell on EBay and other sites. “This weekend showed the EBay search system is pretty fragile.”[more]

posted by: gqpartner

TLS renegotiation attacks: 24 of the 100 top HTTPS Sites Safe

Netcraft:

24 of the 100 most popular HTTPS websites appear to be safe from the recently documented TLS renegotiation flaws. Meanwhile, the other 76 sites are still vulnerable to renegotiation attacks, which allow a man-in-the-middle attacker to inject data into secure communication streams. To demonstrate the seriousness of the issue, Anil Kurmus published details of an attack scenario that showed how the flaw could be used to steal passwords from vulnerable sites such as Twitter.

Among the top 100 HTTPS websites, there are several banks and commerce companies that remain vulnerable. [more]

posted by: gqpartner

Rackspace Survey: 51% Made Mistakes in Capacity Planning

Just two points: a) is it surprising that Rackspace sponsors "no more servers" survey? b) if people make mistakes in capacity planning of their servers -- this appears to be a planing mistake, they might very well repeat in in the cloud world as well.

 STOCKLEY PARK, ENGLAND, November 19, 2009 /24-7PressRelease/:

Rackspace Hosting, the world's leader in hosting and cloud computing, has announced the results of its latest survey, which highlights the growing problem of businesses struggling to cope with the demands of managing their own servers. More than half of the businesses surveyed responded that they would 'love to never have to buy another server again.'

...The study, conducted by LoudHouse on behalf of Rackspace, investigated the views of more than 441 IT managers at mid-size enterprises and revealed that approximately one third of their IT staff's time is spent on server management, which is liable to limit their ability to focus on strategic initiatives that could benefit the business. Fifty eight percent of respondents cited the 'hassle of managing servers' as a challenge for their organization, while 61% of IT managers said 'time to drive innovation' was a challenge.

Additionally, on-site servers were seen to also cause 'server stress' for IT managers, who cited 'the need to be available 24x7', 'hardware issues and maintenance', and 'after-hours calls and issues' as the top three server management issues. The survey also found that 51% of respondents have made mistakes in their server capacity planning. Fifteen percent have bought too many servers and 36% have failed to buy enough. This leaves businesses exposed to the risks of financial waste and the inability to cope with user demand by not getting server spending right the first time. [link]

posted by: gqpartner

2% of Subscribes Used 30% of Data Center Resources

NetworkWorld:

Data Center Lessons from the Online Gaming World
By Robert Lemos , CIO , 11/23/2009

In June, Iceland-based CCP Games brought the hammer down on a group of resource hogs that were clogging its data center.
In an operation dubbed internally "Unholy Rage," the company cut off 2 percent of its subscribers--real customers who had paid to play CCP's massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), known as EVE Online. The small group of players was using software to essentially cheat at the game, automating the collection of resources and the completion of quests to generate gold. These so-called real-money traders would then sell the gold for real-world cash.
Such schemes not only wreak havoc on the virtual world's economy (CCP Games has its own on-staff economist), but the traders also have a significant impact on the company's real-world data center. Case and point: When the company cut off the devious 2 percent of its users, it gained back 30 percent of its computing resources. [Read the rest]

posted by: gqpartner

Earthlink Suffers From Major E-mail Outage

Broadband DSL reports:

Downed server causes multi-day troubles...
10:19AM Monday Nov 23 2009 by Karl Bode
tags: business · trouble · Earthlink Cable Modem Service

Users in our Earthlink forum have been complaining about an Earthlink e-mail outage that began last Friday, and persisted through the weekend. While some users say their e-mail service has since been resolved, others say they were left without e-mail for more than three days. In conversations with Earthlink, the company says the issues are server failure related, but the company wouldn't get more specific. The problems appear to be impacting all Earthlink users, including dial-up, DSL and cable customers. The Wall Street Journal also noted the outage but similarly got no comment from Earthlink. [link]

posted by: gqpartner

eBay's Search Outage Triggered by Lack of Capacity

AuctionBytes via DataCenterKnowledge:

eBay Blames Search Outage on Listings Surge
By Ina Steiner
AuctionBytes.com
November 21, 2009

eBay issued a statement to AuctionBytes this evening after a glitch caused a major outage to its search and browse functions that left shoppers unable to find listings. According to company spokesperson John Pluhowski, "The unanticipated technical issue resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season." According to Pluhowski, eBay had over 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago. He went on to state that full functionality should be restored by Sunday, as the fix for the technical issue was being implemented across the site.

Mr. Pluhowski said the 200 million live listings refers to eBay.com - Auctions, fixed price, and SIF (Store Inventory format).

He did not explain how a 33 percent increase in listings could bring the site to a virtual standstill for an entire day during its busiest shopping season. He did say that eBay would be issuing refunds to sellers, but did not yet provide details.

eBay's large increase in listings has much to do with an onramp it created this year for major retailers to load inventory onto the site. [More]

posted by: gqpartner