Press Releases
Poor application performance costs 1 in 3 enterprises over £1 million per year
[04-09-2006]
Research reveals inadequate performance testing processes in 89% of organisations
London, 4th September 2006 - 89% of organisations have inadequate processes and procedures in place for performance testing new applications according to research commissioned by Morse, the technology integration and services company. With only 11% having the necessary performance testing in place, the majority of organisations are leaving themselves exposed to poor application performance or even application failure when they go live with new applications. In addition, with 33% of organisations admitting that the impact of poor application performance costs them over £1 million and 15% over £2 million each year, it is astonishing that so many organisations have such inadequate testing processes in place.
74% of organisations also admitted that they encounter some performance problems when deploying new applications, further highlighting the deficiencies in the performance testing most organisations undertake. These performance problems often lead to end users not using the application, loss of employee productivity, and poor customer service.
"Organisations simply aren’t managing the risks of going live with new applications. With so many businesses neglecting performance testing, it’s not surprising that so many are encountering application performance problems," said Chris Reid, Managing Consultant, Morse. "However, it’s not just applications that need testing. Ideally, businesses need to be thoroughly testing any IT implementation or deployment, from new storage and security to migrating business data, before it goes live. Otherwise there can be serious impact to critical business processes and, more often than not, the bottom line. Obviously testing costs, but this is insignificant when you consider hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions of pounds, are being wasted due to unforeseen application and IT infrastructure problems."
Many organisations choose to build small scale test environments, test in the production environment or not test at all. This is clearly inadequate as the survey showed that businesses have to undertake a range of work to resolve application performance problems that were not found prior to applications being rolled out to users. For example, 75% of businesses have to tune components of the application and IT environment, while 63% said they have to also make changes to the application or database design. In addition, 52% said they end up having to buy extra hardware to increase capacity to combat performance problems.
"With half of the organisations questioned only building a small scale test environment to reflect the live IT infrastructure, it is not surprising that many have to make adjustments to the IT environment after deployment. For most organisations, it is impractical to build full scale test environments and hence they end up having to make compromises. However, these compromises are costing organisations far too much in terms of performance problems. Organisations need to consider using external testing facilities to help them improve their testing processes and thus reduce the problems and costs of poor application and IT infrastructure performance," Reid concluded.
The survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne and represented the opinions of 100 IT Directors.