As consumers become more open to mobile commerce, retailers and brands need to work on ensuring that the mobile site experience matches that of the desktop PC.

Site testing has increasingly become more important due to consumers’ growing acceptance of mobile commerce.

Mobile users expect to make sacrifices – in content depth and its presentation – in exchange for anyplace, anytime convenience, but the one thing they will not sacrifice is speed.

“A recent survey found 58 percent of mobile phone users expect Web sites to load as quickly on their phones as on their desktops,” said Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Gomez, Lexington, MA.

“This means – mobile sites must be fast, reliable and consistent,” he said. “In fact, the very nature of mobile commerce places an even higher premium on speed and reliability, since people often use their mobile phones to make quick purchases while they have a few spare minutes, or to augment the in-store shopping experience – for example, comparing a product price in one store to a competitive store.

“Simply put, if the mobile site experience you deliver is frustrating or disappointing, you risk alienating your customers or sending them straight to your competitors.”

Consider testing
Companies should take into account a lot of different variables when site testing.

First, companies should make sure that their end-users can find their mobile site and whether it is indexed by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Companies should also see if the links displayed lead to mobile-optimized pages and if they are delivering the correct mobile-optimized content to all users – no matter what device they use.

Next, companies need to ensure that the mobile site content is displayed properly on the most popular devices used by consumers that deliver the most return on investment.

“There are tools available to quickly show how your mobile site renders on several popular devices,” Mr. Poepsel said. “From there, you need to make sure mobile site downloads and transactions are as fast and reliable as they can be on your highest-priority devices.

“Mobile sites should load, ideally in three seconds or less,” he said. “You’ve also got to make sure that multi-step transactions can be completed quickly in the mobile context.

“Part of this is ensuring a mobile site that’s specifically designed for easy navigation by a mobile user, who may be in a rush or typing with just a thumb, for example.”

It is key to deliver a mobile site tailored to the capabilities of the device a customer uses.

For example, a site that is optimized for high-end devices can leverage the latest HTML5 features versus a site that is optimized for lower-end devices.

According to Mr. Poepsel, the most important piece is to test a company’s mobile site from the perspective of end-users.

“You need to look back at your site the same way your customers and users do by operating and running it from the outside in,” Mr. Poepsel said. “It means you need to test and regularly monitor your site the same way your customers use it.”

Growth of mcommerce
Mobile commerce represents a huge and growing revenue opportunity that is just beginning.
Businesses that cannot deliver strong mobile site experiences will be slow out of the gate – and may never catch up.

“Site testing is important because site performance is all about offering a great shopping experience that is fast, secure and performs well,” said Adi Rustgi, director of product management at Digby, Texas.

“When the sites are thoroughly tested and performing well in both aspects of functional and performance testing domains, it helps establish an engaging experience between the retailer and the shopper,” he said. “That has direct effect on the transaction sales and the success of the retailer’s mobile commerce site.

Mr. Rustgi said that there are multiple components of site testing to make sure that consumers enjoy a mobile commerce experience.

The first is functional testing, which involves insuring that the retail shopping functions – navigating from categories to products, adding items to carts and check-out – perform per the retailer’s business rules.

The second is performance testing that ensures that consumers get speedy access to the products they want to search, browse and buy at any time of the day with various levels of load on the Web site.

“Different tools and techniques are used for both of those aspects of site testing,” Mr. Rustgi said.

Additionally, the executive said that there are various techniques for cramming data in smaller packages and decreasing the page download time.

“All of this is done more effectively through the use of a mobile commerce platform that uses data feeds from the retailer,” Mr. Rustgi said.

Mr. Rustgi’s  first tip for cramming data is understanding that customers are looking for easy access to content and an elegant and simple site design.

Companies should keep in mind not to go heavy on the images and JavaScripts. Smaller page sizes lead to reduced download time.

There should also be usage of a content delivery network for serving static content such as images, stylesheets and JavaScript.

This lets customers obtain their content from servers that are closer to them, thereby reducing download time,” per Mr. Rustgi.

“Companies should also be more efficient in presenting content through the use of schemes like pagination,” Mr. Rustgi said. “Also, being intentional in the amount of content that is relevant to a mobile user helps in ensuring that the page sizes are small and download times are fast.

“My final top is zipping the network traffic before content is served,” he said. “Current modern mobile browsers are capable of unzipping content retrieved from the server.”

Evolution of mobile
According to David Brussin, CEO of Monetate, Philadelphia, site testing has evolved to encompass site architecture, experience interaction and targeted content – really any and all elements within a site.

“Testing has evolved beyond what works for all my visitors to what works for each of my key segments,” Mr. Brussin said. “This means that the ability to tailor content and messaging is key, and the mobile device user is a perfect example of a segment that requires a tailored experience to maximize conversion.

“Testing shouldn’t be viewed through the prism of pass or fail, rather it should be viewed as learning and evolving,” he said. “Sites need to continually evaluate the experience and messages they are presenting to consumers and the more marketers are testing their sites, the more power they have to engage their audience and understand their wants and expectations.

“Testing is a key component to the ongoing conversation between a brand and its customers.”

Companies doing site testing want to ensure that all features and functionality run properly, that the user interface standards are met, that the site works on all devices and that it is light and loads quickly.

“Users have come to expect the same standards on a mobile site as they do on their desktop,” said Nick Taylor, president of Usablenet, New York. “If the mobile site doesn’t meet these expectations, brands run the risk of losing customers and potential purchases.

“Mobile sites need to be tested in the same way as Web sites – everyday, throughout the day and regression tested for any release,” he said. “If a page loads too slowly, users will likely leave the mobile site.

“If they read a marketing email on a phone and the link doesn’t take them to the mobile-optimized view, brands are losing out on potential purchases. A site that is consistently failing risks losing customers to competitors with better performing sites.”

Understanding the user experience is key to creating the best performing mobile sites.

HTML5 is extremely powerful and can help in reducing load times.

Additionally, functionality such as expandable navigation and scrolling promotional banners lets brands power the same exciting content and experience that they do on their desktop Web sites, while at the same time making the pages lighter and easier to navigate on a mobile device.

“Don’t wait until a mobile site is fully baked – in your mind – and ready to launch before you test,” said Steve Timpson, president of siteminis, Atlanta.

“Usability testing is an ongoing and iterative process,” he said. “Look at your competition for comparative usability testing.

“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

Phil Hill has two good blog posts up in response to Blackboard’s announcement that it has received at least two “unsolicited non-binding proposals” for the company to be acquired. In his first post, Phil argues that, whatever the outcome of the bidding, Blackboard’s brand value will be hurt:

In one dramatic shift, Blackboard has gone from the known to the unknown.  For years, one of Blackboard’s greatest sales strength was the message that it was here to stay.  Unlike that pesky Desire2Learn, who might succumb to lawyer’s bills and the patent fight, Blackboard was a solid investment with the corporate muscle to be here for the long haul.  Unlike those pesky open source providers, who might disappear or stop developing, Blackboard presented “one throat to choke” and was reliable.  Now, can anyone reliably guess what’s going to happen to Blackboard, who will provide services, whether the roadmap will completely change?

This sales advantage is now gone.

I’m somewhat agonistic on this point. I see Phil’s argument, the size of the impact may be significantly different depending on whether the acquirer somebody like McGraw Hill, somebody like News Corp., or if no acquisition comes through (which I think is the most likely scenario). I don’t have a strong gut feeling about how much this changes the sales conversation.

In his second post, Phil takes issue with one of my previous posts:

Michael is right and you should read the whole post and its second part, but I have a different opinion on the conclusions.  I agree with the conclusions that…

by 2014 we may see it beginning to change the whole picture for educational technology infrastructure in some fundamental ways. Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be an interesting ride.,

but I am less inclined to rely on straight-line projections of market data to look ahead, and am more inclined to think the market changes we are seeing are driven by outside forces with potentially nonlinear effects.  Rome may have been weakened from within, but when real change happened, the Visigoths made it happen….

Today, there is a flood of new money into the educational technology market.  In addition to the potential acquisition of Blackboard, Instructure just raised $8M in venture funding and vying for the role of Alaric in their marketing position, Pearson has been heavily investing in Learning Studio (eCollege for you old-timers), and Moodlerooms raised $7+M in venture funding.  Publishing companies, ERP vendors, private equity, venture funding – these are major disruptive forces.  And there is still significant moves being made by technology companies such as Google.

Whatever happens with the potential acquisition of Blackboard, expect to see a different market emerge, with new dynamics.  For higher education institutions – is your academic technology strategy ready to handle the changes in the market?

I’m not sure that we actually disagree. I also believe that there are some pretty massive changes taking place in the educational technology markets. The only question I would raise is whether those changes will hit quickly enough to substantially change the likely outcome of the evaluations that WebCT and ANGEL customers are going to have to complete in the next 24 months.

Let’s dig into the details a little and see what we can figure out.

First of all, Phil is right to point to the funding that Moodlerooms and Instructure got as indicators that change is afoot. Money matters. If you’re an LMS company and you’re trying to take advantage of a wave of platform migrations, you need to bulk up your sales and marketing teams so that you’ll be able to compete on every RFP. You need to bulk up your customer service, too, so that prospective customers will hear from their peers that you’ve been delivering a top-notch experience. Moodlerooms, Blackboard, and Desire2Learn have all expanded their office space recently, indicating an intention to hire aggressively. (So has Cengage, by the way.) These companies also need to beef up their product suites, either through organic growth or through acquisition. Note, for example, Desire2Learn’s announced acquisition of a lecture capture company. D2L hasn’t said anything about getting new funding, but given the acquisition announcement and some of the aggressive moves that they are making to expand their product line, I would not be surprised if they have received venture or angel funding.

Is this growth new? Yes. It is new. I had an opportunity to speak with Nick Hammerschlag, a venture capitalist at OpenView Venture Partners, about why they chose to invest in Instructure, and why now. On the one hand, OpenView has been looking at the LMS space for a while. It’s relatively large, there are only four major players and, in their view, it is ripe for disruption. But on the other hand, the conditions weren’t right for them before now. For starters, Hammerschlag said point blank that the patent suit was a disincentive. Beyond that, they were having trouble finding a company with the right characteristics. OpenView typically looks to invest in companies that are in an early stage, are doing about a million dollars quarterly in revenue, and are experiencing explosive growth. From their perspective, Instructure’s early growth has been remarkable. “They went from zero to sixty in nothing flat,” said Hammerschlag. Instructure CEO Josh Coates confirms that they have been experiencing very strong demand. He said they are getting about 150 new contacts a week, are currently responding to several dozen RFPs, and could respond to more if they had the bandwidth. Some of that demand is due to work that the company has done, but some of it has to do with market conditions. I don’t think they would have seen anything close to that level of demand two years ago.

So yes, there is clearly market opportunity that is attracting investment dollars. Companies are hiring and acquiring. Blackboard and Pearson, the two most acquisitive players in educational technology, have now been joined by Desire2Learn (as well as the mystery bidders for Blackboard), and I expect others to follow. This will drive up the prices of the companies being acquired which will, in turn, attract new investors. All of this means that new companies and new products will be coming to market faster and more frequently. Big changes are coming.

But how much will those changes affect LMS market share between now and 2014? We know that the main shifts in the LMS market are WebCT and ANGEL customers who are being forced to move as Blackboard retires those platforms. It typically takes a year for a school to select a new platform and another year to migrate. It can be done faster, but it usually isn’t. WebCT is being retired in January 2013. That means schools looking to make a decision (i.e., they are not just going to migrate to Blackboard by default) typically have already started their evaluation process. ANGEL is being retired in the summer of 2014, so those customers have about 12-15 months before they typically have to start their evaluation.

So what changes in the market could move the needle on these evaluations? If Blackboard were acquired, that might have an impact. I agree with Phil that the impact is not likely to be good for Blackboard’s business, but I’m somewhat less certain than he is that it will be bad. Acquisitions of other players could have an impact that might be either good or bad for them, depending on who did the acquiring. (Unlike Blackboard, the other competitors have less of a reputation for being indestructible and therefore may actually benefit from an acquisition by a player that is perceived to have deep pockets and an interest in investing in education.) But the acquisition would have to happen pretty quickly to make a difference. Instructure, which has come along with maximum buzz and strong execution at just the right moment, could eat a few more market share points than I had accounted for in my posts. I’m not convinced that other new entrants or that increased funding of existing players could have an impact beyond the plus-or-minus four percent that I guessed was the margin of error for my projections within the 2014 time frame. At the end of the day, I still think the non-Blackboard LMS market share growth from now until 2014 probably looks something like this:

Keep in mind that my projections are narrowly focused on the traditional LMS market over the next three years. I expect a lot more unpredictable change in the digital textbook market and quite possibly in other educational technology areas as well (e.g., academic analytics). The train is leaving the station for the current round of LMS migrations. But it’s a big station, and there are other trains.

Monetate Inc. has used open-source software to build its tools for enabling e-commerce website operators to develop and test targeted messages and campaigns.

Now, it’s giving a boost to other open-source developers.

The West Conshohocken, Pa., company will award the Monetate Open Source Prize to the best open-source project submitted by a software developer within a 60-mile radius of Philadelphia.

The winner will receive The Ultimate Developer Kick Start Package, which has a value of $5,000 and includes a MacBook Pro; an Apple 27 inch LED Cinema Display; an iPad 2; a $300 gift card for books or cloud services at Amazon.com Inc. ; and a month’s supply of pizza and Mountain Dew.

Entries are due May 11 and will be evaluated on their usefulness and novelty, as well as how much the prize would help their submitters complete them. A panel of judges will choose the five best selections, which will be announced May 19 and placed on the entries page of the competition website http://monetateopensource.strutta.com/ for public voting.

“With the Monetate Open Source Prize we hope to increase the amount and quality of open source code,” Tom Janofsky, Monetate’s director of engineering, said in Monetate’s release on the competition http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20110421/bs_prweb/prweb8330737. “We also want to help publicize the Philly area’s great open source projects and developers while giving them more opportunities to work on their open source passions.”

Exinda, a global provider of WAN optimization solutions, today announced its line-up of activities scheduled to take place at Interop Las Vegas 2011, happening May 8-12, 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. Visitors are invited to take part in live product demonstrations of the company’s Unified Performance Management (UPM) solutions for WAN Optimization, preview new product features, and register for the full day Interop workshop entitled “Virtualization Management: The Road to Private Cloud”.

New WAN Optimization features
With the launch of its ExOS 6.0 software for its WAN Optimization solutions, Exinda became the leader in Unified Performance Management(UPM), as the first to offer complete visibility, control and optimization with a single appliance. At Interop Las Vegas 2011, Exinda will share details of its ExOS 6.1 version, including the introduction of Asymmetrical Object Caching (AOM), or single-sided cache, which will improve the performance of video applications over the WAN.

“Virtualization Management: The Road to Private Cloud”
Also at Interop Las Vegas 2011, Exinda’s vice president of marketing, Kevin Suitor, will share real-world deployment experiences of its WAN Optimization solutions at a full-day workshop entitled “Virtualization Management: The Road to Private Cloud.” Mr. Suitor will address how WAN Optimization can help to address many of the challenges facing network managers, including increasing bandwidth usage, complex business applications, and the growing use of cloud computing and hosted virtual desktops by an increasingly mobile workforce.

The “Virtualization Management: The Road to Private Cloud” workshop will take place on Sunday, May 8, 2011 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For more information or to register for the workshop, visit http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/conference/virtualization-management.php.

Unified Performance Management – Live Demonstrations
Exinda will also deliver live, real-time demonstrations of its latest WAN Optimization solutions at booth #1005. Visitors can experience how UPM enables network managers to dramatically improve the delivery of applications and enhance user experience by providing full visibility, control and optimization within a single appliance.

Using Exinda’s live demonstration, visitors can see the traffic on its virtual network, identify problem areas, quickly apply policies to control or optimize traffic, and immediately see the performance improvements.

About Exinda
Exinda is a proven global supplier of WAN Optimization and Application Acceleration products. The Exinda Unified Performance Management (UPM) solution encompasses application visibility, control, optimization and intelligent acceleration – all within a single network appliance that is affordable and easy to manage. Founded in 2002, Exinda is headquartered in Andover, MA and has established regional offices in Canada and the United Kingdom to support the growing global demand for its products and services. Exinda is a 100% channel business with products being distributed by a worldwide network of solution partners who offer local support and services. For more information, please visit http://www.exinda.com.

Exinda and the Exinda logo are trademarks of Exinda. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Distributors continue to ramp up their managed services strategies. The latest example: Arrow ECS (Enterprise Computing Solutions) is building out an Arrow Fusion Services strategy that includes professional services, consulting, cloud services, education and support. Within the cloud initiative, Arrow has introduced selected managed services for VARs and MSPs. Lee Fawsett, VP of Fusion Services, shared some updates with me yesterday.

I met Fawsett during an Arrow ECS open house near Atlanta, Ga., where the distributor showcased a new lab that VARs and MSPs can leverage for testing and proof-of-concept work. Most of my conversation with Fawsett focused on cloud computing, with a touch of managed services mixed in. So far, the Arrow Fusion Cloud Services include:

• Remote monitoring and IT as a service, including managed services. I suspect NetEnrich is assisting in this area, since Arrow and NetEnrich have a business relationship.
• Security as a Service and Software as a Service: Fawcett described how Arrow plans to line up vertical market SaaS applications for VARs. It sounds like the SaaS applications will be hosted in Terremark data centers.
• Infrastructure as a Service: Including public cloud services and managed server options.
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Including offsite backup and mirror imaging to safeguard businesses during a disaster.

It’s safe to expect Arrow to add more Fusion Cloud Services in the next few months. Among the potential moves I’m watching: During the Arrow open house yesterday, some Arrow presenters described a relationship with Verio — the web hosting specialist.

Competition Looms

Still, managed services seems to be a small piece of the broader Fusion Cloud Services strategy. In stark contrast:

• The Ingram Micro Seismic team has helped to transform more than 1,000 VARs into MSPs… though Ingram has also spent more time emphasizing cloud computing in recent months — pointing partners to the Ingram Micro Cloud site, which launched around November 2010.
• Synnex recently expanded its managed services push, hosting Level Platforms‘ remote monitoring and management (RMM) software for VARs and MSPs. Synnex also entered managed services relationships with Axcient and Intronis (cloud storage), Reflexion (anti-spam and email security) and Symantec.

Generally speaking, I think transforming VARs into MSPs has been a challenging task for most distributors. In addition to identifying best-of-breed software tools for aspiring MSPs, distributors have also worked to educate VARs on recurring revenue business models and MSP sales compensation plans. Cloud computing may accelerate the transition, however, since end-customers are starting to demand cloud services — forcing VARs and MSPs to either develop recurring revenue models or bow to competition.

eEye Digital Security, a provider of IT security and unified vulnerability management solutions, will present a live web event, “On the Frontline of the Threat Landscape” on Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 9:30 AM (Pacific) / 12:30 PM (Eastern).

More than 425 IT Security professionals have registered for the session, hosted by eEye CTO and Cofounder, Marc Maiffret. Known for his candid approach to IT Security, Maiffret will provide an overview of today’s threat landscape, including the latest zero-day statistics and recent high-profile attacks, such as “Night Dragon” and “Stuxnet.” In this online presentation, Maiffret also will give his perspective on the evolving “attack surface” that IT Security professionals are daily working to protect, offer real-world tactics for configuring security settings across an organization, and respond to questions and comments from session participants.

“This webinar is an extension of eEye’s ‘On the Frontline of the Threat Landscape’ tour we did across four major cities in March,” said Marc Maiffret, eEye CTO and cofounder. “The idea is to continue the conversation with the IT Security community and communicate simple, practical tactics that can greatly improve their security posture, even against the headline-driving threats like Aurora, Stuxnet, and Night Dragon.”

Register for the webinar, “On the Frontline of the Threat Landscape.”

About eEye Digital Security
Since 1998, eEye Digital Security has made vulnerability and compliance management simpler and more efficient by providing the only unified solution that integrates assessment, mitigation, protection, and reporting into a complete offering with optional add-on modules for configuration compliance, regulatory reporting, and integrated patch management. eEye’s world-renowned research and development team is consistently the first to uncover critical vulnerabilities and build new protections into our solutions to prevent their exploit. Thousands of mid-to-large-size private-sector and government organizations, including the largest vulnerability management installations in the world, rely on eEye to protect against the latest known and zero-day vulnerabilities. More eeye.com.

Company: ExactTarget, a global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions

Product/Service: A new suite of social CRM capabilities for its CoTweet social media management application

What it Does: The CoTweet Social CRM Connector helps extend the benefits of social media across an organization by creating a more complete view of an individual’s lead, opportunity or case history. Users can capture a conversation from Facebook or Twitter, associate it with an individual’s CRM profile, and then tag it as a lead or opportunity. The expanded capability also gives organizations new data to better measure the impact of social media programs.

Management system software maker for the educational sector, Instructure Canvas, has raised $8 million from venture capitalists in an attempt to scale up its operations and widen its customer base.

The Utah-based startup said its investors included OpenView Venture Partners, EPIC Ventures, TomorrowVentures, and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurveston.

Founded in 2008 by two computer science graduate students, Instructure develops learning management software that helps teachers manage interactions with students through a variety of ways including distributing assignments as well as grading students’ work.

Today, the company appears to targeting its giant rival, Blackboard (News – Alert). The company is currently servicing more than 30 educational institutions, the majority of which are those who have switched from Blackboard to Canvas.

“The investment will be used to scale the company’s operations and to keep up with market demand,” said Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure.

Coates, who was a teacher at Brigham Young University, previously worked for many companies including search-technology pioneer Inktomi, Scale Eight and most recently the online storage provider Mozy, which was purchased by EMC (News – Alert) for $76 million.

On February 1, Instructure announced the availability of Canvas as open source.  Since then, thousands of schools districts and universities have begun evaluating Canvas and turning to Instructure to transition their existing LMS solutions.

“We were compelled by Josh and his team’s vision of delivering outstanding user experiences to those in the education market,” said Firas Raouf of OpenView Venture Partners. “The LMS market is long overdue for a new learning platform built on the latest Web-based technologies.”

Canvas streamlines standard LMS features like the integrated gradebook, assessment tools, discussions, multiple assignment submission types, rubrics and Web chat. Its grading tools, including SpeedGrader for the iPad, reduce the amount of time educators spend grading assignments.

Canvas leverages the leading edge of Web technologies by embracing features such as drag-and-drop file uploads, HTML5 video and automatic speech-to-text conversion. It also integrates with popular Web 2.0 tools and social media platforms like Google Docs and Facebook (News – Alert).

When a teacher changes the date of a quiz, for example, students automatically receive text messages on their cell phones, messages on Facebook or conventional emails, according to the company.