If a website can’t quickly add resources when customer usage is high, it can mean lost sales. An unresponsive site or a stalled checkout can cause a person to walk away.

The elasticity of running the application on the cloud can help, but cloud service providers’ reactive format, where resources are added when you hit a threshold, may not be enough, said Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale Networks. There is a lag between the time the application needs the resources and the time it gets the resources, she said.

To alleviate that problem, Webscale has launched a new portfolio of cloud-enabled products in its web application delivery platform that include predictive auto-scaling, multi-cloud, performance optimization, security and manageability features.

Puri said Webscale goes beyond the basic auto-scaling and elastic load balancing (ELB) features that cloud providers because it does predictive analysis on user behavior.

“We predict in advance when the resource is needed,” she said. “And we understand cloud behavior. We know certain cloud providers like Amazon may take a minute and a half to turn up a new instance, and Google might take 50 seconds. So, we make the decision well in advance of when the provider would need to give that additional resource, and we bring up additional functionality for that customer.”

This is important to ecommerce companies because users demand fast web page response, she said.

According to a study from Kissmetrics, 47 percent of consumers expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less, and after three seconds, 40 percent of people will abandon that webpage.

“If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year,” Kissmetrics reported.

Webscale gives companies peace of mind that their sites will be available and responsive when they run a marketing campaign, Puri said.

“Fundamentally marketing doesn’t need to worry about, ‘Hey, did the IT guy give me enough infrastructure to do this promotion?’ Marketing does whatever they need to do. The back-end infrastructure is always there because our software brings it into play as needed,” she said.

In addition to predictive auto-scaling, Webscale’s integrated application delivery platform includes the following:

• Support for multi-cloud environments: Built and delivered as a service, Webscale works across all public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructures, as well as static hosting environments.

• Manageability: Users can manage their websites from a single screen that gives them a snapshot of their sites’ status, including alerts and notifications.

• Performance improvements: Webscale boosts site performance by modifying content before delivery, Puri said. This includes caching and resizing of images, as well as rewriting asset locations from a content delivery network.

• Free cloud migration for Magento customers who sign up for a Webscale Pro contract before April 30, 2016.

• Security: Webscale’s web application firewall supports security policies such as SSL/TLS encryption and Distributed Denial of Service attack mitigation.

Puri said Webscale is easy for business professionals to use. They can quickly and easily sign up for the cloud-based platform and start using it.

“We’ve said you don’t have to be an IT star to use our stuff. You don’t have to be technically savvy,” she said. “We’ve consumer-ized the use of network acceleration. The middleman is going away. In this case, you don’t need a systems integrator or an IT guy. You can, as a business owner, just click and get what you need.”

Joe Skorupa, vice president and analyst at Gartner, said Webscale’s decision to take its traditional application delivery controller and make it cloud-based is important.

“By 2017, one-third of application delivery deployments will include cloud elements, and network infrastructure architects will no longer be able to rely solely on centralized appliances to provide the necessary services,” he said in a news release. “Application delivery strategies must move from this model of physical devices allocated to specific applications, to one that includes physical, virtual and cloud-based services.”

Pricing

Webscale’s platform is available in four options:

• Webscale Free: This no-cost option includes 10GB of data transfer a month.

• Webscale Lite: Aimed at small- to mid-size companies, it costs $250 a month and includes 250GB of data transfer per month.

• Webscale Pro: This version includes up to 1TB of data transfer per month and starts at $2,500 per month.

• Webscale Enterprise: This option provides additional support, increased network bandwidth and data transfer limits, and other additional features. Pricing is available on request.

Photo credit: Amy via flickr