HP European Website Championship tournament 2008 demonstrates importance of application management

Every day, leading European websites covering the European Championships 2008 battled against one another in a 90 minute virtual tournament.

Each country's 'team' consisted of the country's European Football Association website and its top two sports websites.

Websites were monitored by the HP SaaS team on their speed, responsiveness and performance to determine an overall winning country.

Average response times between websites were shown to vary between 0.5 - 4 seconds.

At the end of each match, average aggregate response times were calculated and the country with the lowest aggregate score was determined the winner of the game.

In yesterday's final, Czech Republic - a previously unbeaten team with impressively low website response times beat France comfortably with the lowest aggregate response time for the tournament (23.79 seconds) and was declared the overall winner.

Last weekend, the Group E semi-finals and the final, (consisting of teams that did not qualify in the football championships), took place.

In strikingly close matches, Belgium won against Denmark and Finland narrowly took the lead against England.

In the Group E final, Belgium came top against Finland.

The website monitoring conducted by HP SaaS during the European 2008 Football Championship is a simple demonstration of HP's expertise in application management.

The results from the daily website monitoring highlighted the challenges that websites face in terms of performance and user traffic and the importance of implementing a comprehensive application management strategy to ensure that web-based applications deliver the desired end-user experience.

'On a business level, the success of any on-demand services and applications, online websites or even online companies depends on the websites' performance and the ability to monitor, analyse and enhance the users' experiences. A positive or negative end-user experience with a website's performance - including the time it takes to access or download information - can determine whether an end-user continues to further interact with the brand or whether they simply go to a competitor,' said Mahmoud Mounir, Software Director, HP Middle East.