Forrester Research predicts that online shoppers will spend over $13 billion during the holiday season in the US, an increase of 20 per cent over 2003.
“Resilience has always been critical to operating a successful web infrastructure but over the last year the stakes have got a lot higher,” commented Steve Palmer, VP Marketing at Zeus Technology. “This research shows that the combination of massive increases in traffic and zero tolerance of downtime adds up to a major problem for network managers. This is particularly true of the critical Christmas season, with major websites taking an average of 1.5 million ($2.8 million) per day in orders. This equates to a loss of 62,500 ($120,000) per hour of downtime – not a Merry Christmas for retailers.”
As well as greater website activity (78 per cent of those surveyed), other factors increasing traffic included web services implementations (60 per cent), email (57 per cent) and SSL-encrypted traffic (43 per cent).
In order to safeguard their Internet infrastructures 51 per cent of organisations have had to invest to cope with growth. 79 per cent of organisations have installed back up units, with others investing in new, application-centric solutions.
To meet this need Zeus Technology has launched Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager v3.0, the next generation traffic management, security and optimisation solution which provides centralised control and resilience of application traffic and ensures seamless interaction between web enabled services. Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) leads the way in intelligent application-centric traffic management, enabling users to enhance their systems flexibly, rapidly and in line with the needs of the business.
About Zeus Technology
Zeus Technology is the leader in the development of application traffic management solutions for the Internet. With ten years’ experience in developing application-level software, including the multi-award-winning Zeus Web Server, Zeus Load Balancer and Zeus Mass Hosting Application, Zeus is now delivering the next generation in Layer 4 to Layer 7 traffic management solutions with its flagship product, Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager.