Companies with best-in-class web application performance saw a 25% increase in web-related profitability compared to an industry-average 5% decrease from 2008 to 2009, according to a new report from Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE:HHS). The report, Optimizing the Performance of Web Applications - Directions for Improvement, was sponsored in part by application delivery platform provider Crescendo Networks.

Top performers in the survey of 100 organizations also realized monthly increases of 12% in web-related revenues and 20% in successful conversions. In contrast, average performers experienced a 3% decrease in web-related revenues and a 4% decrease in successful conversions per month.

Organizations in the best-in-class category reported 98.94% and 98.39% availability of critical revenue-generating and employee productivity-producing web applications, respectively. In addition, of the top performers:

• 24% had dedicated web application performance teams;
• 59% had web application performance, infrastructure and availability monitoring with real-time alerts 24x7;
• 29% had a real-time view into the performance of revenue-generating transactions.

The findings reinforce an earlier Aberdeen report showing that a company´s business performance suffers when its web pages take longer than five seconds to load. That report, The Performance of Web Applications: Customers Are Won or Lost in One Second, found that delays can significantly reduce conversions, page views and customer satisfaction.

“Together, these two Aberdeen reports demonstrate that companies need to focus on providing top-notch web application delivery or risk losing customers, revenues and web reach,” said Adoram Ga’ash, CEO of Crescendo Networks. “Our high-performance application delivery controllers can play an important role in the optimization process by improving site response times, protecting from flash crowd events, and otherwise ensuring the best end user experience through a proprietary hardware architecture built specifically to maintain speed and reliability even under the most challenging load conditions.”

About Crescendo Networks
Crescendo Networks accelerates and optimizes delivery of business-critical Web applications through the market’s best-performing application delivery controllers. A purpose-built hardware design with a massively parallel architecture enables Crescendo’s ADCs to outperform competing products under peak load with all features turned on, allowing servers to serve user requests even under massive HTTP traffic or extreme load. The company’s products are used by many of the world’s most sophisticated and fastest-growing Web properties to ensure usability, facilitate rapid business growth, lower IT costs and capture additional revenue. For more information, visit www.crescendonetworks.com.