Greasing the wheels of Web commerce

Having raised $25 million in venture capital financing in January, Watchfire is "pushing ahead full-steam" to become profitable by the end of the year and go public at about the same time, says Michael Weider, founder, president and CEO of the Kanata, Ontario-based company.

Why so optimistic? Because in a slowdown, the Global 2,000 companies that make up more than 80% of Watchfire's revenue are concerned with getting the most out of their existing Web sites, according to Weider.

"The last five years, the focus has been on building the infrastructure," he says. "Now the focus is on, how do we make it work?"

Working the Web

Watchfire offers two main products. Its Enterprise Solution lets administrators create "spiders" that constantly crawl through Web sites searching for more than 50 types of content problems, such as broken links between pages and forms that don't work.

The Enterprise Solution comprises the Linkbot Enterprise Server, which stores data about Web site performance and delivers it in customized reports; the Linkbot Developer Edition, which makes the scanned data available to developers who can troubleshoot and fix the problems; and the Macrobot, Watchbot and Linkbot tools, which scan Web sites looking for broken links.

Watchfire's Metadata Management System helps Web administrators analyze and manage metadata about their sites, making it easier to organize and search Web sites. It's currently running on Web sites with as many as 5 million pages and 5,000 servers, says Weider.

Several customers praise Watchfire's ease of use, flexibility and scalability. Yack.com Inc., an online guide to Web-based events such as chat sessions and celebrity appearances, chose the Watchfire Enterprise Solution last October to determine how easily viewers can access the 150,000 events in its database, says Wilcil Joseph, a quality assurance manager at the New York-based firm.

Joseph says he considered site management services but rejected them because Yack wanted a product that could be customized at both the scanning and reporting levels. "For example, there are some pages on our site that never change," he says. "I don't want the scanner to go over those pages every time."

"We have about 500 people who contribute [to a public Web site], ranging from Java developers to just somebody who posts a calendar," says John Woods, a managing consultant at Buchanan Associates, a consulting firm in Irving, Texas, that uses Linkbot Enterprise, Linkbot Developer and Metabot to manage Web sites for Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. in Fort Worth, Texas. "We wanted something which could be easily used and easily understood."

Content-centric

Watchfire addresses problems with Web site content only, however, not with underlying infrastructure such as Web servers and network switches. That means customers need to buy, configure, learn and manage both Watchfire's tools and other site measurement and testing tools.

In addition, the software runs only on Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers, with no plans for a Unix version. But once installed, the tools can scan both Unix and Windows Web servers, claims the company.

Watchfire recently signed a co-marketing agreement with Vignette Corp. in Austin, Texas. Vignette's tools, which will manage actual Web site content such as documents, will be linked with Watchfire's tools, which ensure that content is accessible, says Weider.

"Our objective is to integrate our software with the workflow of all content management systems," he says, so that after a product manager or designer has approved the look and feel of a page, Watchfire can automatically check it to ensure that the page will actually work.

Those are big plans, but with solid backing -- and Web sites big and small trying to prove their worth -- Watchfire may be one bright spot in a troubled market.

The Buzz: State of the Market

The Web Integrity Niche

Watchfire plays in a loosely defined space it calls "Web content integrity," which means it helps ensure that content on a Web site is accessible to users. The company's niche is in providing a software product, not a service, and in focusing on finding and fixing structural problems with Web site content, such as broken links or slow-loading pages.

Because the market is so specific, IDC has no estimates for its size, says Dick Heiman, an analyst at the Framingham, Mass.-based research firm. Heiman and others caution that Watchfire's tools work only within a corporate firewall and don't address Web server problems or network slowdowns that can also affect the user experience. For the big picture, they say, Web managers will need to add capabilities such as load testing and monitoring of the overall Internet.

Among the current major players are the following companies:

WebCriteria Inc.
Portland, Ore.
www.webcriteria.com

Max, WebCriteria's intelligent browsing agent, simulates the way an average user sees, thinks and moves through a site and compares it against a usability model to assess how user-friendly the site is. Uttam Narsu, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., says that because it's based on "kind of a theoretical model," he doubts Max can predict a user's actual experience.

Keynote Systems Inc.
San Mateo, Calif.
www.keynote.com

Keynote provides a service that uses a worldwide network of servers and assesses actual Web site performance from different locations and over different-speed connections. This is still only a partial answer to the site analysis problem, says Narsu, because it only monitors the health of the Web, not a server behind a corporate firewall.

Mercury Interactive Corp.
Sunnyvale, Calif.
www.svca.mercuryinteractive.com/

Mercury Interactive is pushing into the Web site monitoring space with its Astra LoadTest and Astra QuickTest. Its ActiveWatch service, like Keynote's, monitors Web site performance from various points around the globe.