HP European Website Championship tournament 2008 demonstrates importance of application management
HP Software as a Service (SaaS) today announced the winners of its European Website Championship 2008 tournament, which ran in parallel to the European 2008 Football Championship. Every day, leading European websites covering the European Championships 2008 battled against one another in a 90 minute virtual tournament.
Each country’s “team” consisted of the country’s European Football Association website and its top two sports websites. Websites were monitored by the HP SaaS team on their speed, responsiveness and performance to determine an overall winning country. Average response times between websites were shown to vary between 0.5 – 4 seconds. At the end of each match, average aggregate response times were calculated and the country with the lowest aggregate score was determined the winner of the game. Further information on the project can be found here.
In yesterday’s final, Czech Republic – a previously unbeaten team with impressively low website response times beat France comfortably with the lowest aggregate response time for the tournament (23.79 seconds) and was declared the overall winner.
Last weekend, the Group E semi-finals and the final, (consisting of teams that did not qualify in the football championships), took place. In strikingly close matches, Belgium won against Denmark and Finland narrowly took the lead against England. In the Group E final, Belgium came top against Finland.
Example of website monitoring results for Czech Republic vs France final
The website monitoring conducted by HP SaaS during the European 2008 Football Championship is a simple demonstration of HP’s expertise in application management. The results from the daily website monitoring highlighted the challenges that websites face in terms of performance and user traffic and the importance of implementing a comprehensive application management strategy to ensure that web-based applications deliver the desired end-user experience.
“On a business level, the success of any on-demand services and applications, online websites or even online companies depends on the websites’ performance and the ability to monitor, analyse and enhance the users’ experiences. A positive or negative end-user experience with a website’s performance – including the time it takes to access or download information – can determine whether an end-user continues to further interact with the brand or whether they simply go to a competitor,” said Mahmoud Mounir, Software Director, HP Middle East.
Highlights
• The website response times from the HP tournament ranged from the highest aggregate score for the tournament: 313.45 website response time (Croatia) to the lowest 23.79 seconds (Czech Republic).
• The overall best performers, Czech Republic demonstrated the best average aggregate response times (42 seconds) for the six matches that they played.
• The country total for Czech Republic when measured on aggregate scores for response times over six matches was 234.57 seconds.
• Only five out of the 19 European countries’ websites showed aggregate website response times for the tournament of under 60 seconds; Belgium (51 seconds), Finland (52 seconds), France (48 seconds), Denmark and Czech Republic (42 seconds).
• The websites with the highest aggregate response times on average throughout the tournament included Croatia (227 seconds), Poland (209 seconds), Sweden (203 seconds), Russia (173 seconds) and Turkey (116 seconds).
• Despite thunderstorms over Germany on Wednesday 25th June, there were no anomalies in Germany’s and the Czech Republic’s website performance meaning that the websites were all stable while the television feed was affected.
Further information
Match 1 Match 2 Match 3 Match 4 Match 5 Match 6 Average Aggregate score
Austria 103.18 84.8 83.63 77.28 87
Belgium 47.74 59.1 47.76 49.49 46.99 45.51 49
Croatia 208.81 159.14 313.45 227
Czech Republic 87.07 37.64 31.36 25.41 29.3 23.79 42
Denmark 59.3 36.15 34.17 37.44 52.55 44
England 34.08 36.02 35.7 41.87 45.39 39
Finland 60.99 81.4 52.1 41.6 40.69 51.53 55
France 45.74 48.63 52.31 48.44 47.83 46.70 48
Germany 75.44 75.36 73.99 72.88 74.44 74
Greece 95.87 83.14 91.09 73.78 84.39 86
Italy 66.25 61.47 68.01 65
Netherlands 45.55 49.23 125.58 139.49 90
Norway 85.97 64.39 78.88 76
Poland 137.12 225.11 265.84 209
Portugal 80.67 162.49 75.81 79.33 100
Russia 199.3 143.09 177.68 173
Spain 129.57 87.29 112.94 110
Sweden 202.55 155.93 250.4 203
Switzerland 104.4 134.26 103.08 114
Turkey 117.92 131.51 97.37 116
The European Website Championship 2008 used HP SaaS for HP Business Availability Center (BAC). This managed service delivered through HP’s SaaS division helps companies to reduce costs and achieve faster results by better managing enterprise applications and end-user monitoring processes.
