The Internet is changing business. Businesses are rethinking their business models and taking a fresh look at their products, customers, distribution, and partners to understand how they can leverage the dramatic changes that are taking place for their competitive advantage.

As businesses develop new strategies and plans, they must take into account the differences of doing business on the ‘Net. With the efficiency and leverage the Internet provides, the impact of a good or bad business decision can be immediate and dramatic. Thus the importance of in-depth analysis and evaluation of business-policy decisions before executing an e-business strategy is now even more imperative due to the way the Internet can amplify their impact.

Traditional IT departments had internally focused applications with a finite user population and had a reasonable ability to predict and control system usage. Today’s service providers are now building outward-facing applications over the Internet with very large and highly variable user loads with these loads more than tripling each year.

Your best customer is being treated the same as a random surfer. In order to deliver the high level of service you demand for your best customers, you must provision capacity for the masses.

Even with these extreme measures, Web application servers are still becoming overloaded due to surges in demand from flash crowds and more sophisticated resource-intensive applications.

Worse yet, what should be your most profitable time, usage-peaks, are today your worse PR nightmare. When your site’s at its busiest, your customers’ performance is at its worse. When a Web site becomes overloaded, the performance becomes so bad your customers won’t bother finishing their transactions. So at the time your e-business should be at its peak, it is, in fact, at its worst, and poor performance on your site will discourage your customers from coming back again.

Enterprises implementing business-to-business or business-to-consumer solutions are all very concerned about their customers’ experience: in-store, on-phone, and on-net. The challenge is to cost-effectively deliver consistently high-quality service even during surges in activity.

Business managers have either formal or informal service-level agreements between themselves and their customers. The services and quality of service delivered defines a business manager’s e-business.

Business managers and IT must work together to develop policies for delivering differentiated service levels to provide premium services to strategic partners and customers in their profit-centers while providing consistent and cost-effective service to others in their cost-centers.

Just as travel and hospitality allocate extra capacity for their most profitable customers such as at their priority check-in counters, so now must business managers set policies and prioritize services for their customers on the 'Net.

This trend is a window of competitive opportunity for service providers who are addressing service delivery in terms of availability, responsiveness, and capacity at various differentiated classes of service.

Currently, to carry out either an informal or formal service-level agreement, a service provider relies on measurement and monitoring tools, capacity planning and experience. Relatively little is available that provides the ability to set and control the level of service being delivered.

HP’s strategy is to provide you with the products, solutions, and services that give you the control you need to maximize your probability of success so you can confidently and aggressively move ahead with your e-business plans.

HP’s Web QoS will provide business managers with an infrastructure that allows you to deliver secure, dependable, and consistent service levels giving you the capability and confidence to aggressively leverage the Internet to your competitive advantage. With HP’s Web QoS differentiated solutions, you can achieve significant competitive service and cost advantages with the ability to control a rich set of user and application priorities.

HP platforms will provide IT managers with the ability to assure service-levels for their Internet applications by extending our traditional strengths with:

• Peak Usage Management - Prevents system overload conditions through optimized demand scheduling and resource allocation. Prevents performance for active sessions from degrading, even during surges in demand – improving customer satisfaction and maximizing the number of completed business transactions.
• User Classes - Allows business managers to prioritize service to users and transactions based on class of service. Analogous to providing more agents and services at the first-class counter, User Classes allows for allocating extra, and optionally billable capacity and services for priority users and transactions enabling a business manager to offer a rich array of differentiated services.
• Service Classes - Allows business managers to prioritize allocation of system capacity and performance, enabling multiple services to be co-hosted without impacting each others performance and policies such as borrowing capacity from a lower-priority application to increase capacity for another.

HP’s Web QoS roadmap is to deliver technologies that allow our server platforms to support a rich set of operational service-level objectives (SLOs) within an end to end QoS solution.

SLOs enhance the relationship between business managers and their service providers by providing:

Simple management tools and templates will be available for setting SLOs for straightforward policies, but policy management systems that translate business policies into service-level objectives will be the key to unleashing significant business-value from this technology. SIs, ISVs and ISPs will be able to significantly enhance their value by delivering user and service tiering.

HP will leverage our leadership HP OpenView Service Management, HP Firehunter, and HP Consulting products and services to provide an unmatched offering. HP will also work with leaders such as Cisco, Oracle, Netscape, Microsoft and SI’s such as EDS, CAP Gemini, KPMG, E&Y, CSC, Price Waterhouse, and Anderson to maximize the value of this technology.

In the end, Web QoS will deliver the following benefits:

• Prioritize users - control a rich set of business-policies
• Predictable performance - customer retention
• Complete more transactions - maximize throughput
• Maximize up-time - fewer stress-related failures
• Prioritize applications - better use of resources
• Consolidate servers - reduce costs

By prioritizing customers and services and efficiently managing capacity against growing demands, Web QoS will enable enterprises and ISPs to improve customer loyalty, reduce costs, and deliver highly-differentiated and highly-valued services over the Internet.

©Copyright Hewlett-Packard Co., 1998
All Rights Reserved. Reproduction, adaptation, or translation without prior written permission is prohibited except as allowed under the copyright laws.

Send email to Interex or to theWebmaster
©Copyright 1998 Interex. All rights reserved.