Everyone developing e-commerce applications or designing and managing commercial web sites is sensitive to the critical factors governing the success of these systems. Image, content, navigability and security of applications on e-business servers are critical and can be controlled and tested at the design and development stage. But how certain are you that you can control the performance of those e-servers regardless of the pattern of usage? There have already been highly publicized failures such as Encyclopedia Britannica which received 10 million hits a day, 100 times its capacity. Callnet's free phone Internet service collapsed under the weight of registrations when launched. To save these sites further embarrassment let us just say that they were overwhelmed by success! In fact they could have avoided most of their problems by accurate capacity and performance planning. Most e-business failures have been server based.

By the time you've read this sentence, you've lost another client

That's the way it is with e-commerce. Your competition is only a click away. If your web server is slow, all the customer has to do is type your competitor's web address into the address line on their browser. One click and that client is lost to your competition forever. In fact, the accepted view is that a web site user will only wait eight seconds before losing patience and clicking on another site.

Why might your web site run slow? Not because of the network. Despite everyone's fears for the network, there is plenty of bandwidth out there. Nearly all web server performance problems are local to the server. Get the Performance Management of your server right, and the customer stays with you. Of course, the more successful you are in attracting potential clients to your web site, the greater the danger that performance of your server will degrade.

We need to spend as much time planning for E2K as we did for Y2K!