Micro Focus has revealed new research which shows businesses in the UK risk losing up to £36.7 billion in revenue per year if their websites fail during peak periods.

This is according to a new report by the UK tech firm Micro Focus (LSE: MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application modernisation, software testing and requirements management solutions, and the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR), which found that nearly £100 million of British e-commerce revenue is already lost due to website failures and outages every year.

The report shows that the UK’s e-commerce industry is worth £320 billion per year and growing at an unprecedented rate of 20 per cent year-on-year. The market is likely to grow even faster in the next ten years, as the proliferation of smart phone usage fuels more online transactions, meaning they stand to lose significant revenue and market share to rival firms if their websites fail.

David Valentine, general manager at Micro Focus, commented: “As a result of website failures, almost £100 million of e-commerce revenue is already lost every year. If businesses don’t ensure their e-commerce applications can handle the extra loads experienced during peak times, such as July and the run-up to Christmas, the cost could reach £36.7billion.

“Businesses must not only protect against this potential loss of revenue in the short term, but also protect their brand and reputation in the longer term by ensuring a better customer experience,” continued David Valentine. “Making sure that websites and the applications that run on them are tested for the highest volume of anticipated users has traditionally been expensive and difficult to manage but new, scalable cloud-based testing services make this much more cost-effective.”

Ensuring that e-commerce sites can withstand peak loads is a challenge because traffic can vary from 5,000 transactions per hour at normal times to 50,000 during a promotion or peak period. Traditional approaches to load testing required a large investment in infrastructure to replicate the peak volumes, but Micro Focus’ cloud-based model removes the need for this overhead. Instead of investing in hardware that is not used for a large portion of the time, businesses can use Micro Focus SilkPerformer CloudBurst on demand to test for peak user volumes only when they need to. In addition, CloudBurst lets website and software quality teams rapidly launch any size peak-load performance test, from any location in the world, without the burden of managing complex infrastructures, and offers diagnostic tools that locate the root causes of performance issues and fast-track their correction. When integrated with the SilkPerformer family it even lets IT teams test enterprise applications that have mixed internet and internal-facing aspects.

Via EPR Network
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