Tealeaf: Experience Your Customers

99.999% Uptime? Not Anymore.

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

Recently this article was published by the New York Times. An excerpt follows:

"MA BELL spoiled us. AT&T’s dial tone set the all-time standard for reliability. It was engineered so that 99.999 percent of the time, you could successfully make a phone call. Five 9s. That works out to being available all but 5.26 minutes a year."

The article goes on to talk about how major service providers like Facebook, Paypal, Google have not been able to meet this goal — and why it make not be practical/cost effective to achieve this goal in the near future. And if the best of the best can’t meet this goal, what about the rest of us?

In the analog world of MA BELL, dial tone was not only easy to measure but also soothing. And, most importantly, dial tone was a clear measure of success.

In today’s digital world, there is no dial tone. You dial the number and hit send on your iPhone. Will the call go through? Will I be able to hear? Will the call get dropped? Will I get stopped by the police for driving and talking on the phone without a handsfree device? More importantly, will I have a productive conversation with whomever I am talking to?

I realized this 10+ years ago before I started Tealeaf. Even though all the status codes were "HTTP 200" and all of the pages were fast and available, my web-based applications still failed and I didn’t know why.

So, performance and availability measures are not enough. In order to understand the customer experience, you have to be able to see it.

I'll Take a Mobile App to Go – Hold the Extras, Please

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

So, I was putting the Apple iPad through its paces — that is, after I pried it away from my kids, who were happily playing games. Bring up the web browser — sure enough, I can hit every website and it works. Faithfully reproduces the experience of my laptop/desktop.

Then I went to a couple of banks that I have accounts with. I downloaded their native apps. Quick, easy.

The native app (check account balance, recent purchases, etc) seemed like it was much faster. Even faster than my high-powered laptop.

And then I looked around — where did all the junk go? The ads, the images, the offers — all of the stuff that I try to ignore when I am looking at my account balance. Gone, Gone, Gone.

Is this because I am paying for the bandwidth — or in the rush to put out a native iPhone app – did they forget to include the "value added extras"?

A recent survey from Accenture shows what shoppers would most like to see in mobile apps, depicted in the chart below from emarketer.com. (Note: none of them want the "junk.")



According to Janet Hoffman, managing director of Accenture’s Retail Services, in order for companies to deliver a successful customer experience, they must have a deep understanding of their users. This is especially true when it comes to mobile apps: From a recent eMarketer article on the topic, she says:

"Companies need to use all of their customer information to better understand how and when their customers want to engage with them, ask them questions or just check some basic product details. Only then can they deliver a personalized and enjoyable experience, while lessening the risk of alienating customers through unwanted approaches."

A Common E-Commerce Platform

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

When I was thinking of starting Tealeaf, the VCs had me play me a game called "The Rock."

I had to demonstrate that there was a vast, untapped market for what Tealeaf would do — and also convince the folks with money that my approach was relevant and defensible… as in "Bring me back a red rock showing a multi-billion market potential for your technology along with a business plan for how we would address it."

So, back in 1999 our dream was to attach Tealeaf to the standard e-commerce platforms and ride the coattails of their success.

BroadVision, Intershop, Blue Martini, OpenMarket, Commerce One, Vignette, ATG were my red rocks.

Yesterday, ATG announced that they are being acquired by Oracle for 1 billion dollars. At least they had a happy ending.

The others had meteoric rises into the stratosphere. However, they all came crashing down like Spacelab.

From what I can tell, the most common e-commerce platform is "Other" — custom solutions built on top of IBM WebSphere, Microsoft Commerce Server or just plain old code. Given the rise of SOA and Web Services, certain components of the stack may be third-party services, but most sites are largely built from the ground up.

Remember, in the childhood fable of the tortoise and the hare, it was the tortoise who won. So too shall Tealeaf as Customer Experience Management goes mainstream.

The New Hardware?

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

What happens when VMware becomes the hardware platform?

VMware is a software virtualization platform, so why am I talking about hardware?

Allow me to prove my sanity and explain what’s going on.

We’re all familiar with concept of "thin provisioning," otherwise known as "lying" or more commonly the "airline seat model." Basically, an airline will sell 120 tickets for 110 seats. They expect some percentage of people not to show up or misconnect — and they still want to fully utilize the physical resources, i.e. the seats.

In the airline model, if 120 people show up, 10 people get bought off with free tickets and a later flight.

And so now we have thin provisioning in the computer world. Thin Memory (Virtual Memory), Thin Disk (San disk allocation), Thin CPU (Compute Resource Allocation) and Thin Network (Network Resource Allocation).

Last year, Cisco, EMC and VMware banded together to create a reference platform of Thin Cubed (CPU, Storage, Network) called vBlock.

Gone are the days of referring to the HP computer or Dell or IBM. Parts are parts — you’re just using Thin Cubed Resources, just like electricity. You don’t care (unless you’re a California Green nut like me) if your electricity comes from natural gas, coal, solar or wind, you care only that when you flick the switch, the light comes on.

So, what are some of the benefits of such an arrangement:

Mobile Thinking: A Change of Heart

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

Perhaps my thinking was backwards.

When I first started thinking mobile, I had it in my head that the functionality of a mobile app would be a subset of the existing desktop-browser experience.

When you start thinking about the:

1. The itty-bitty twit screen
2. Lack of keyboard
3. Limited bandwidth
4. Limited OS and processor
5. Limited storage

And then the fragmented eco-system of iPhone, iPad, iPod, Android, Blackberry, Palm, Nokia, Windows Phone with different OS levels and the like — the “subset” mentality was easy to make. Who is going to build native apps — isn’t every device manufacturer just going to try and build a browser that approximated desktop agility?

Back to the Future

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

Gas up the DeLorean, crank her up to 88.

Do you remember PowerBuilder, Visual Basic 1.0?

What about porting applications to/from Sun, Apollo, HP, Digital Equipment, MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2?

How about writing installation programs for all of the above, keeping track of a mish-mash of different versions—and of course dealing with a personal favorite, 'DLL Hell.'

As Bob Seger would say, ”Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.”

The Client-Server phenomenon started with a vengeance in the 1980's as the personal computer market grew at an exponential rate. The technology shifted in the early 90's from 2-tier client server (Client/DB) into n-tier (Client/Appserver/DB) with SAP's R3 success. With the rise of the internet, there was a huge shift away from 'installed applications' and a movement into thin-client (i.e. browser-based) applications—both for internal use (employees) and customers.

And here we are in 2010, about to head back into the Client Server fray.

By all indications, handheld mobile devices (iPhones, iPad, iPod Touches, Android, Blackberry and other smart phone devices) will eclipse the installed base of desktop computing devices within a couple years. Every person will be walking around with a highly portable computational device with network connectivity.