Computerworld
Quick Menu
Search



Ads by TechWords

See your link here


Subscribe to our e-mail newsletters
For more info on a specific newsletter, click the title. Details will be displayed in a new window.
Web Site Management
Application/Web Development
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
More E-Mail Newsletters 
Computerworld 2007Subscribe to Computerworld
40 years of the most authoritative source of news and information for IT leaders.

Credit card companies' Web sites disappoint

 

Sign up to receive Web Site Management Resource Alerts

June 21, 2005 (Network World) -- Credit card companies have room for improvement when it comes to Web site reliability, according to Keynote Systems Inc. Poor performance over dial-up connections also is a common problem, the Web performance monitoring firm reported recently.

Keynote studied nine of the largest sites in the credit card industry -- American Express, Bank of America, Bank One (which is now a part of J.P. Morgan Chase), Capital One, Chase, Citibank, Discover, MBNA and Providian -- and measured their ability to handle common online transactions such as when a customer checks account balances, views transaction histories and manages account information.

Bank of America, Capital One and MBNA topped the rankings with scores of 77, 66 and 63 points, respectively, out of 100 possible points, but none dominated all of Keynote's performance categories. As a whole, Web site responsiveness and reliability are the two key technical challenges the credit card industry faces, says Ben Rushlo, manager of professional services at Keynote.

Taken together, the sites averaged 97.5% site reliability during the peak hours of 8 a.m. to midnight, Eastern Standard Time. The best credit card sites, Bank of America and MBNA, were down less than three hours during the entire four-week study, while the worst performers -- which Keynote declined to identify -- reported more than 19 hours of downtime.

A 2.5% error rate is significant when you compare it with other industries where average site uptime is consistently above 99%, Rushlo says. Keynote just finished a similar study of brokerage firms' Web sites, and the top five performing sites achieved 100% availability without a single instance of peak downtime during a monthlong study, Rushlo says.

Another weak metric across the board was site performance over dial-up connections -- despite the fact that about 43% of U.S. households use dial up, Rushlo says.

Industry data suggests that a Web page that loads in less than 15 seconds over a dial-up connection is acceptable. In this study, only one site had an average page load of less than 30 seconds, and in some cases the average page load was close to 60 seconds. To load one site's account summary page -- which draws data from back-end business systems -- took more than two minutes with a dial-up connection, Rushlo says.

For the study Keynote took 6,000 measurements of each credit card company's site and compared the sites using 34 service level metrics, which boil down into 10 rankings: average of each T1, DSL and dial-up response; response consistency; geographic uniformity; load handling; page design; network connectivity; reliability; and outage hours.


Reprinted with permission from

For more information about enterprise networking, go to NetworkWorld.com
Story copyright 2008 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.


Print this Story Send Us Feedback E-mail this Story Digg! Digg this Story Slashdot this Story
"Desktop Linux acceptance is picking up speed and that's scaring the pants off Microsoft...." Read more...
"This multinational company is converting a U.S. business unit to its new ERP system, and it turns out that there..." Read more...
Read more Development posts or See all Blogs
Microsoft feared Mac vs. Vista comparison in '05, insider e-mails show
Downed Hadron Collider faces $21M in repairs
Thanks to gamers, the desktop supercomputer arrives
More top stories...
Hosting firm takedown bags 500,000 bots
New Firefox app lets users pimp their browsers
Microsoft to launch major upgrade to NAV ERP software Dec. 1
If you're like our 7,000 survey respondents, your paycheck this year has been flattened and your bonus obliterated. We offer 12 ways to plump up your paycheck.
Microsoft's next OS might more accurately be called Windows 6.5: It's essentially a better version of Vista.
Twitter can be a valuable business tool -- if you know what you're doing. Here's how to juice it for all it's worth.
By helping Intel with loosened 'Vista Capable' requirements, Microsoft 'severely damaged' its credibility, said an HP exec in a newly unsealed Feb. 2006 e-mail.
Get the latest news, reviews and more about Microsoft's newest desktop operating system
Find wage data for 50 IT job titles.
All Zones
Business Continuity Zone
The File Data Management Zone
Security Management Zone
The SAS Zone
Business Intelligence and Analytics Zone
The Enterprise Search Zone
Software as a Service Zone
The Security Zone

Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Sold on SOA

(Source: Computerworld) It's the hot technology for most large companies, but business, technical and cultural issues must be addressed for a successful SOA implementation. Get the whole story, from the big picture to the how-to-do-it details, in this Executive Bulletin. Download this Executive Bulletin (a $49.95 value) for Free, compliments of Fujitsu.
Download this executive briefing download
Advances in SSL and Certificate Management
Advances in SSL and Certificate Management
View this webcast now!
Go to the webcast 
Driving Business Success Through Workgroup Choice and Flexibility
Download this white paper compliments of Novell!
(Source: Novell) The structure of your workgroup environment plays a vital role in enabling your knowledge workers to be productive and collaborate securely. And IT choice and flexibility can mean the difference between reactive spending and proactive investment. Boost your competitive advantage with a workgroup infrastructure that lets you deliver the tools and services that are right for you. Download this white paper to learn how Novell offers a variety of solutions that give you the flexibility to address critical business initiatives and workforce productivity.
Download this white paper go
White Papers
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services.
Collaboration Tools and Organizational Success
Driving Business Success Through Workgroup Choice and Flexibility
Boost Productivity While Cutting Costs with Next-Generation Collaboration
View more whitepapers