Yes – ten thousand percent!

We commonly come across situations where a customer has configured an application to meet their functional requirements but the system runs so slowly that it is virtually unusable. It is very common to find people blaming the database, the network, machine sizes – in fact, virtually anything except the real cause of the problem. Almost always, the cause is poor configuration.

We often become involved when the customer has tried a number of approaches and third party organisations without success. They are normally amazed at how quickly we can make serious in-roads into their issues.

In one situation we encountered, an organisation exposed Siebel across the web to allow external people to register for exams and view their results. At peak times, it was critical that the system was responsive.

A few days prior to go live, they discovered that the key View in the system took half a minute to respond with 150 concurrent users and simply died with 300 users. In just 3 days consulting, by changing the configuration with no change in functionality, we reduced the response time with 150 users to 0.3 seconds – a 10,000% improvement, and still achieved sub second response at the 300 user mark.