Transcript: Speeding e-commerce at Quixtar

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1375/speeding-e-commerce-at-quixtar

Guest: Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
Host: Ed Morgan - Symantec

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Ed Morgan - Symantec
Welcome to another Symantec Podcast. This is Ed Morgan, Content Director at Company, representing Symantec. Today we'll take a look inside another Symantec customers business to help you get better results for your business. We're talking today with Steve Kesselring, IT manager for Quixtar. Steve, to start us off, who is Quixtar and how long you've been in business.

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
Quixtar is the North American affiliate of the Alticor Corporation and we launched in September of 1999, and are an e-commerce business.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
And what are some of the products that you market?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
Our products are across the board from anywhere from health and beauty to household goods, also have a catalogue, called our store-for-more and we have many partner stores. One of our larger brands is Neutrilite, it's a brand of vitamins, minerals and dietary supplements and that's sold through Alticor worldwide. Another one of our primary brands is Artistry and that is a skin care cosmetics.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
Talk a little bit about your marketing model.

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
We provide people at low cost, way to start their own business, we refer to those business owners as independent business owners or IBOs, almost 80% of our IBOs interact with our business through electronic means, be it our website quixtar.com or our other means, which would be a Touchtone.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
I bet that's put some pressure on your IT group as the online commerce becomes more important to the business model.

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
It's become very important to us to support our website. You can imagine in 1999, the Internet wasn't really ready for the type of amount of e-commerce that we were going to do and the level of interaction we were going to have with our IBOs.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
What drove you to look at application performance management tools?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
It became clear to us that our old monitoring tools that we used for internal applications and internal servers, didn't work in the e-commerce model quite as well. What we found was that truly the help of some hardware with the help of the operating system was not a true indicator of how well the application was running on any particular application to your particular device.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
So, what did you need to really get a good handle on how well the application was performing?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
We needed a tool like, i3 that would allow us to see an application from end-to-end. So, i3, with its agents, allows us to see a transaction coming in the front door, go all the way through our tiers, all the way back to the backend to the database and all the way back out through the front door back to our IBO or customer.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
And what kind of problems can you solve when you have that end-to-end view.

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
Lot of times you don't know, you can say a transaction is three seconds long but you don't really know, what parts of the transaction is taking the most time. So, if a transaction has to hit five tiers, before you can start to do much de-bugging or deep dive monitoring, you need to know, which of the tiers is taking 80% of that three seconds.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
What are the principle benefits of i3 to your organization?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
We wanted to be able to give our operations staff viewer tools to look at. What we found was that the i3 product gave us benefit in two areas -- one was the end-to-end application monitoring of real transactions and secondly, a very big benefit was there was also a tool that would give us deep dive into a couple of platforms that we had almost no visibility into and that was our J2EE Application Server environment or .NET environment and as added plus we are able to have another tool that would dive into our Microsoft SQL Server environment.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
And I see it rolls all those up into one counsel, is that right?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
Yes, its going to roll it all up into counsel with rolls that we can allow the SQL Server guys to see SQL Server, we can allow the Webster guys to dive in and look at WebSphere, our web operations team obviously will be able to look at everything across the board and be able to pick apart transactions as well as being able to look back to the historical archive that i3 has for future trending of resources.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
How big is your deployment of i3?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
I am going to say that we're somewhere in the neighborhood of about a 100 devices between those two applications.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
What about overhead, how does i3 stack up?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
The utilization of the i3 product in most cases is 1% or less.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
We've heard other stories that some of the competitive products take a little bit more overhead than that, what is your experience been?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
Absolutely, we see that one of the tools that our DBA group is currently using to monitor their SQL Server database; we typically see that in the 10% almost range day in and day out.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
As you look down the road, what are some kind of improvements that you'd like to see?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
What I find very intriguing about i3 is the fact that if we let this product run for a while, it will make some best guess thresholds for particular transactions. We may not be happy with those thresholds but the reality is that's the threshold, that's the SLA that we're currently providing based on two months worth of data. So, I am looking forward to being able to provide that and provide that to our customers and also know that if a change goes in, an application change goes in, the defects of transaction will, we should be immediately able to see whether it reduces utilization and the response time is less or it turns out to be more. Probably one of the second things for them looking for is our ability to see trending overtime, to know whether we have a particular server farm that needs to be upgraded to 64 bit or we need to add more devices or that we've increased our performance in our application and we can reduce the number of devices in a farm.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
Any final thoughts on i3?

Steve Kesselring - Quixtar
One of the things that we haven't been able to find up until now was a tool that did .NET, Microsoft .NET deep dive monitoring and to my knowledge possibly even now i3 might be the only tool that provides the .NET monitoring to the level that we needed to see down to the component level.

Ed Morgan - Symantec
Well, thank you so much for joining us, but that's all the time we have, this was another look at the value Symantec solutions can provide your business. To find out more visit www.symantec.com.