Analyze This: Web Insight with the Sun Web Analytics Solution

In today's marketplace, organizations of every size seek an extreme competitive advantage in Web efficiency – and the Sun Web Analytics Solution can provide that advantage. The solution can take you from knowing how your Web page is doing, to knowing how your products are doing, and ultimately to knowing how your individual customer relationship is doing.

The Web is a growing asset in the business world, from e-commerce to brand presence. Forward-thinking businesses understand the importance of sophisticated Web design, metrics, and goals – with a view toward improving the Web user's experience. Every kind of organization is looking to the Web – from telecom to healthcare, retail, financial services, travel, manufacturing, high-tech, and more. And many companies recognize the importance of upleveling their brand value for Web users and enhancing their competitive edge as a result. Doing so requires a deeper, more comprehensive approach to an enterprise's Web presence, as well as having a clearer view of the results of Web activity.

Organizations also need to know – what's going on right now? The answer can be found with Web analytics, a valuable business tool used to collect, analyze, and report aggregate data about Web viewing behavior. Unfortunately, very often Web analytics are either limited in the insight they provide, or they can be expensive; low-end solutions provide a limited snapshot view without historic information that is vital to understanding trends, while high-end offerings are simply out of reach due to their cost. With the Sun Web Analytics Solution, there's an answer that's timely, comprehensive, and cost-effective. Built on a foundation of proven Sun hardware and software, Greenplum database, choice of commercial or open extract-transform-load (ETL) layer, and powerful reporting tools, this complete solution provides two orders of magnitude superior price/performance over competitors and applies Sun expertise to speed problem resolution.

There's no need to wait days to see custom graphic views of large clickstream data sets, because the innovation of the Sun Web Analytics Solution enables you to access the information in near real time. In fact, it answers data queries 10 to 50 times faster than traditional solutions. The solution also leverages the Data Warehouse Appliance by Sun and Greenplum to ease trend analysis by allowing fast and efficient views of historical data. With the Data Warehousing Appliance, the solution can scan up to one TB of data in 60 seconds, while the capacity of the solution scales to up to 100 TB of highly detailed clickstream data out of the box. Beyond this, it can easily be scaled to a petabyte of capacity. And the solution's integrated database software, systems, services, and clickstream analytic tools provide new levels of insight – from understanding the effectiveness of your Internet presence on a large scale, all the way up to your relationships with individual customers.

Businesses know that the more complete the data, the clearer the analysis will be. Current data-gathering methods generally use page-view counting or simple log-file analysis, which simply do not provide the whole picture.

According to Hitwire, visits to the top U.S. Web 2.0 sites have grown 666 percent in only two years. As companies rapidly deploy Web 2.0 capabilities to enhance the user experience, more "events" can occur on a single page – everything from read/write feature reviews, to zooming in on preferred information. While events are the relevant and desired activity data for organizations – not basic page-view information – multiple events on multiple pages produce massive data that must be managed and analyzed. Managing event data enhances the value of the information you collect only if it can be processed usefully.

This is a challenge that Sun's Web Analytics Solution meets with flying colors. Instead of providing only limited data sets such as Web traffic information, Sun's solution can capture any and all of your clickstream data, system performance information, and security logs, and it easily customizes the data you receive. It manages this data with the power of enhanced scalability and efficiency.

Modular design is the key to this scalability, and open-source software makes it easier as well. Sun's Web Analytics Solution utilizes an open-source operating system – the Solaris 10 Operating System with its Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Solaris Containers, and Zettabyte File System (ZFS) technology for virtually unlimited file system size – as well as open-source database software, with Greenplum Database on Postgres loading hundreds of megabytes per second. Greenplum has provided a new class of parallel database system, specifically built to facilitate large-scale decision support demands. Its shared-nothing architecture and low-cost commodity computing and interconnect design make it open-source software that keeps your costs down and your ROI up.

You also have the choice of either a commercial or an open ETL layer, with either KETL or Unica Affinium NetTracker. The open-source KETL scalable data integration platform, sponsored by Kinetic Networks, easily extracts, transforms, and loads all of its Web data through a powerful data integration platform – while Unica Affinium NetInsight offers turnkey Web analytics tools that provide detailed business intelligence reports on clickstream paths, Web-content quality, and Web site visitor retention. Both choices make technical information clear and comprehensible to business decision-makers at every level.

And the entire system is built on fast, reliable, compact Sun Fire X4100 servers, along with the industry's first data server, the incredibly high-performance Sun Fire X4500 server. Both servers are powered by AMD Opteron processors, which bring massive performance to bear on large data sets and minimize the costs for space, cooling, and energy in the datacenter. With this kind of hardware efficiency, your datacenter costs can plummet – the solution needs only 110 W per terabyte of data.

The solution can also help you proactively manage the loss of quality for your company's Web presence. Because you can autoload system log files into the system that correlate user Web viewing behavior with datacenter performance, you'll be able to know in advance when your IT infrastructure approaches crucial limitations in processing, memory, bandwidth, and storage. As a result, you can avoid slowdowns and surprises – or, worst of all, downtime.

The Sun Web Analytics Solution easily integrates with the leading business intelligence front-end tools for extremely customizable visualization, providing optimal data clarity for the decision-making process of Web users. It serves all authorized users with personalized, near-real-time data that's easy to track, while it enables targeted response marketing to the individual.

Reliability, which is always a watchword in Web operations, is also a top priority with the solution. It offers robust failover and mirroring capabilities for continuous uptime, and you have the opportunity to use Sun's (and partners') global support network as well. SunVIP Interop global support provides 24/7 operational uptime, with Sun and Greenplum support agreements. Unica and Kinetic Networks also provide direct support for your business.

The Sun Web Analytics Solution provides the critical information and insight you need to improve Web site design, marketing program effectiveness, and customer experience. There are many useful applications for the solution – from A/B analysis to e-commerce monitoring, Web design improvement to traffic analysis, and Web viewer preferences measurement to infrastructure and security analysis.

If you're ready to gather the data that will help drive more business to your Web presence – and your company – Sun innovation makes it possible for you to obtain a market-leading solution at a low cost. With the Sun Web Analytics Solution, there are three standard sizes preconfigured to speed implementation, or we can customize one for your specific business requirements. If you'd like to know more about the Sun Web Analytics Solution, including a NetTalk presentation soon to be announced, visit our Web site at sun.com/webanalytics.