Royal Mail
A company's web presence can speak volumes about the way it wishes to be perceived by the marketplace. So, given that a good deal of 'first contact' is often via the internet these days, it becomes easy to understand just why a good website is now such an essential business tool in its own right.
However, there is more to having a 'good' website than simply delivering a nice-looking home page and a couple of 'Flash' presentations. In fact, some memory-intensive web applications can actually do more harm than good, especially if your site is already struggling to deliver the performance and page response times that your customers expect.
Independent surveys repeatedly state that poor web response times are a principal reason for users disconnecting from a site and moving on to another. A sobering thought indeed - especially in today's ultra-competitive business environment.
The Royal Mail Group - with the help of Reading-based network and application performance specialists Teneo - is well aware of these issues and has recently completed an overhaul of its own web presence - one which has dramatically improved the site's page delivery and response times, but without the need to add further expensive bandwidth or communications hardware. Furthermore, they achieved all of their success criteria within the boundaries of a well-managed and realistically-budgeted project - a rare thing indeed! So what was background to this success?
Although it's fair to say that most people probably know of the Royal Mail, the group itself actually consists of three separate businesses - the Royal Mail (collection, sorting & delivery); the Post Office (retail sales, stamps, savings, etc) and finally Parcel Force Worldwide, the commercial parcel and freight business. All three of these businesses are represented through their own sites on the Royal Mail Group's shared ecommerce technology platform.
The Royal Mail Group's web site itself has three principal propositions of sales, service and information provision and historically, it has been the service provision activities - such as postcode lookups, parcel tracking, etc - that have tended to put the most stress on web resources. Like most other businesses, the Group's site is also subject to the usual peaks and troughs of demand. However, unlike most other businesses, this demand is not only affected by the time of day, but by the time of year as well, with the Christmas period being understandably the busiest period of all. But while site efficiency was regularly monitored, delivering against 'aspirational' site response times was inevitably a rolling battle, according to Royal Mail's chief technology architect for e-business, Tharmananthar Shankaradhas.
"We were constantly battling to provide an acceptable level of service for site visitors, despite huge variations in site workload, which would effectively double at certain times of the year, such as Christmas," commented Shankar. "Consequently, one of our objectives was to maintain good availability and good site performance during the 2004 Christmas period," he added.
Fundamentally, the Royal Mail was looking for a way of improving the site responsiveness throughout the year. "Simply increasing processing power would not have helped as the key constraints were the size of pages and their content as well as the fact that most users still access RM sites via dial-up links. We could have easily spent our money in the wrong areas," said Shankar.
Teneo's suggested solution to Royal Mail involved US web application performance experts, FineGround. FineGround's approach to web performance is to deploy a software or hardware appliance, which intelligently manages the use of available bandwidth - as opposed to simply throwing more costly server infrastructure and bandwidth resource at slow performing applications. The solution appeared both innovative and attractive to Royal Mail, and, according to Shankar, the next step was to put it to the test.
In short, FineGround's Performance Suite accelerates delivery of web content to users, while effectively decreasing the amount of bandwidth necessary via a number of optimisation techniques, so users see a net increase in web service to the desktop, while content providers see a significant reduction in server workload.
Royal Mail initially piloted the FineGround application in its own staging environment - where it tests all new web applications prior to launch. Both Teneo and Royal Mail quickly established that in principle, FineGround would deliver exactly what the Royal Mail was looking for, namely a significant increase in its web service and reliability. Shankar and his team also undertook unit-level testing to establish compatibility with all other Royal Mail web hardware and applications.
Following a successful round of concept and staging tests, the decision was taken to go live with FineGround in early December 2004. Initially, the solution was rolled out within the Parcel Force section of the Royal Mail site, followed closely by the Post Office and Royal Mail sections.
Immediately, Shankar and his team began to notice improvements. Historically, Royal Mail's web pages had large number of images which not only affected response times but also imposed load on the web servers. By holding a significant quantity of the Royal Mail's most frequently-requested images locally, FineGround was able to reduce web server workload by a factor of 10.
Furthermore, page response times were also reduced significantly. Prior to the implementation of FineGround, the Royal Mail received a constant stream of customer complaints about the amount of time taken to access its web content online. These complaints have now dropped - as have the server response times - because FineGround has delivered significant improvement in page response times.
"FineGround doesn't actually reduce web traffic nor increase infrastructure capacity," continued Shankar, "but it does deliver the next best thing - it uses infrastructure capacity more intelligently, because of FineGround, the browser now only passes requests to the server that it cannot deal with itself locally," he added. Or to look at it another way, using FineGround has effectively reduced Royal Mail's web page sizes.
Teneo CEO Piers Carey also makes the point that intelligent use of available bandwidth is the way forward for other businesses in a similar situation to the Royal Mail. "As organizations strive to focus on providing good web services to their internal and external users, they are beginning to realize that simply adding capacity or bandwidth is not enough. By deploying management and optimization solutions that positively impact user experience, real performance and ROI benefits can be seen," he said.
Either way, Royal Mail's web services are now operating responsively, as opposed to being slow and frustrating, as it was before Teneo's implementation of FineGround and a number of other performance enhancements. Significantly, the Royal Mail's web service achieved 100% availability and good responsiveness throughout the 2004 Christmas period.
Indeed, Shankar and his e-business team have been so pleased with the performance of Teneo's FineGround implementation, they are happy to recommend Fineground to other areas of Royal Mail's business to see if the solution can deliver further benefits for the Group. In the meantime, however, it looks as though the Royal Mail Group has added another technology to it's portfolio of technologies in order to deliver a much improved web user experience.