Application performance monitoring and management is an increasinglyhigh-leverage category, with direct impact on both hardware andsupport costs - and on the hard-to-measure but critical end userexperience. For Enzo Micali, senior vice president and CTO ofWestbury, N.Y.-based 1-800-Flowers.com, application performancesoftware was a quick win that enabled him to both control hardwarecosts and guarantee performance in mission-criticalsituations.

The week before Mother's Day, 1-800-Flowers.com typically receives asmany as 100,000 Web orders a day. To handle that kind of demand,Micali needed a better view into the capacity of his three datacenters to maximize performance relative to his infrastructure costs.For less than $200,000, Micali got a suite of software from MercuryInteractive that lets him deploy both functional and performancetesting to simulate quality of service under peak loads.

"How long does a user in Seattle take to add a dozen roses to theirbasket?" asks Micali, noting that the answer can be very differentwhen volume spikes to 10 times the average. Mercury's software hashelped the company simulate Mother's Day, improve performance and puta cap on hardware costs while avoiding risk.

"Relative to the benefit, it's inexpensive," Micali says. "It's costavoidance. You don't buy additional hardware if you don't need it."Plus, he adds, "The amount of business risk that's mitigated is huge.If my site were to go down on the Friday before Mother's Day, Iwouldn't be here on Monday."

Cutting Complexity