In January 2001 WebPerform announced the completion of a $7 million round of equity financing. The primary investor is Doughty Hanson & Co Technology, a leading European venture capital fund. The co-investor is DB eVentures, a Deutsche Bank global private equity investor that forges partnerships to drive technology innovation in financial services.
In their early days WebPerform were invested in and supported as part of the GorillaPark stable of companies and GorillaPark continues to leverage its network across the major European markets to facilitate WebPerform's expansion.
Matt Bartell, WebPerform's Technical Director explains what their service offering delivers to clients: "WebPerform provides clients with full visibility and control of the actual performance received by each and every online customer from the only perspective that counts - the customer's perspective. We have developed independent, impartial services and technology that will allow our clients real-time access to the end user experience, combined with innovative diagnosis, resolution and customer service management capabilities. We provide customised turnkey solutions for businesses, resulting in a compelling competitive advantage."
WebPerform is rapidly expanding into Europe and is implementing powerful solutions across PC-based Internet services, digital TV and wireless (GPRS networks). The WebPerform technology is currently being used in the retail and financial services sectors.
CDP has been working with WebPerform since the start, when the company were three strong and worked out of GorillaPark's first premises in the historic surroundings of the old Royal Mint building near Tower Bridge.
Now with nearly forty staff and their own premises opposite Cannon Street station CDP continue to be the core supplier of database expertise to the company.
The main challenge, according to Mike Cooper, CDP's Technical Director, is to build a system capable of accepting and processing large volumes of web site traffic data: 'One of WebPerform's key offerings is the monitoring of actual page and page object level download timing and other metrics for all the consumers of a site. This data is streamed back to WebPerform by software, created by WebPerform's own developers, running at each client's internet service provider. Their key customers are financial and retail companies with complex and heavily used sites, which can be generating data on a 24x7 basis. WebPerform need to load, aggregate and generate meaningful reports on this data from all their customers within minutes. The system must also generate alerts based on site performance and provide near real-time metrics to support their innovative Customer Service Messaging service. This service communicates directly to individual consumers via their browser offering them an incentive to stay online during periods of less than ideal response times.'
WebPerform are using Oracle 8i databases running on Hewlett Packard servers. A high throughput reporting engine uses Oracle Reports to generate HTML and Adobe PDF based online reports. Oracle Discoverer is being used as part of a 'portal' style service being offered to larger customers.
CDP are providing strategic consultancy, analysis, design and build services for all of the Oracle technologies used, as well as for the Microsoft Active Server Page based in house client support application used to manage the monitoring services.
Matt Bartell, WebPerform's Technical Director explains why he uses CDP: "I have worked with CDP on three major bespoke development projects over the last five years. Meeting the requirements of fast moving, organisationally complex business requires technical excellence, people focused account facing teams, project management, and people who 'get out of bed to do what they enjoy'. In my experience, CDP have all of the above. Upon my appointment as CTO of WebPerform, I invited CDP to analyse, design and deliver our data related developments, a complex area of our development that I feel assured will deliver."
For more information please contact Mike Cooper on 020 8600 7550 or email mike_cooper@cdproj.com.
WebPerform can be contacted on 020 7676 2900 and are at www.webperform.com
