Comprehensive Web Insight with the Sun Web Analytics Solution

Enterprises' Web presence is a significant competitive advantage, and a clearer picture of the results of Web activity is crucial to enhancing brand value for Web users. Web analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting aggregate data about Web page views, tracking the succession of mouse clicks that each visitor makes. More and more companies use Web 2.0 capabilities to improve the viewer's experience, but because Web 2.0 designs may have multiple "events" on a single page view, simpler forms of Web analytics don't provide a full profile of viewer activities. The significance of this is even greater in light of the explosive growth of Web 2.0. According to data presented by Nielsen/Netratings, Web 2.0 sites represent the fastest growth on the Internet, outpacing online video and news.

Managing event data is necessary because events are the most relevant Web activity data, as opposed to simply counting page views or tabulating "to-from" traffic data. Monitoring the activities undertaken by each visitor on each page – everything from read/write feature reviews to zooming in on preferred information; every action contributing to their total Web viewing behavior – provides a powerful tool to inform companies of the status of their relationship with customers. However, multiple events on multiple pages produce massive data, which may be challenging to manage and utilize in a timely, comprehensive, cost-effective manner.

The Sun Web Analytics Solution offers answers to these challenges, with instant Web insight on a massive scale. Leveraging the power of the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance, the solution extracts, transforms, loads, and graphically analyzes up to 100 terabytes of Web visitor behavior information out of the box, correlating it with system infrastructure data such as security and server performance. As a result, you can predict and avoid bottlenecks in memory, bandwidth, processing, and storage resources – proactively managing the loss of quality in the Web presence, minimizing downtime, and growing with business requirements. The solution can also easily be scaled up to match growth, expanding up to several petabytes in capacity.

Applicable to A/B analysis, e-commerce monitoring, traffic analysis, viewer preferences measurement, infrastructure and security analysis, and Web design improvement, the solution provides sophisticated metrics, goals, and Web design. It enables the IT department to document the effectiveness of the business' Web presence quickly and completely, from the organizational level up to a particular customer relationship – it can be personalized to provide better targeted response marketing to the individual.

The complete Sun Web Analytics Solution offers two orders of magnitude superior price/performance over competitors, with benefits including:

• Information access in near real time, with custom graphic views of large clickstream data sets
  
  
• Data queries answered 10 to 50 times faster than traditional solutions
  
  
• Integrated database software, systems, services, and clickstream analytic tools for new levels of insight

Easily customizing the data received, the solution captures clickstream data, security logs, and system performance information. The Sun Web Analytics Solution also makes visualization highly customizable, providing maximum data clarity for authorized users and smoothly integrating with major business intelligence front-end tools.

The solution leverages the innovation of Sun and its partners to help you optimize your Web presence. It uses Sun hardware and software, a choice of open or commercial extract-transform-load (ETL) layer, powerful reporting tools, and the Greenplum database for an end-to-end solution for the Web tier. The solution's features include:

• Continuous uptime with robust mirroring and failover capabilities
  
  
• Sun's (and partners') global support network – Unica and Kinetic Networks, and 24/7 operational uptime with SunVIP Interop global support and Sun and Greenplum support agreements
  
  
• Extreme scalability and flexibility, with modular design and open-source software – there are three standard sizes preconfigured to speed implementation of the solution, but it can also be customized to fit the needs of your business
  
  
• Tremendous energy savings – the solution requires only 110 W per terabyte of data
  
  
• The most advanced operating system available, the open-source Solaris 10 Operating System, offering leading-edge features such as Solaris Containers for nearly unlimited virtualization, Zettabyte File System (ZFS) technology for virtually unlimited file system size, and the granular accuracy and speed of Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology for maximum reliability and uptime
  
  
• Open-source Greenplum Database on Postgres software – built on commodity computing and interconnect design, as well as shared-nothing architecture – provides a new class of parallel database system, loading hundreds of megabytes per second to facilitate large-scale decision support demands
  
  
• Capability of scanning up to one TB of data in 60 seconds with the Sun Data Warehousing Appliance
  
  
• Sun Fire X4100 servers, with extreme speed and reliability packed into a minimal footprint to save datacenter resources
  
  
• Sun Fire X4500 servers – the industry's first data server
  
  
• KETL or Unica Affinium NetTracker for an open-source or commercial ETL layer – Kinetic Networks' KETL scalable data integration platform seamlessly uses a powerful open-source data integration platform to extract, transform, and load Web data; the turnkey Web analytics tools in Unica Affinium NetInsight offer complete reports on Web-content quality, clickstream paths, and Web site visitor retention

One of the most important assets that IT can bring to a company is Web presence. The Sun Web Analytics Solution helps enable IT personnel to know how their Web tier is performing, how it can be improved, and how costs can be kept down. To learn more about the Sun Web Analytics Solution, including a NetTalk presentation soon to be announced, visit our Web site at sun.com/webanalytics.