engineer, research and developement
Every e-commerce merchant has experienced the frustration of the abandoned shopping cart and online businesses know that retaining a customer can hinge on factors as mundane as how quickly the Web site pages load and how long it takes to complete a transaction. In addition to investing in the appropriate infrastructure, e-commerce companies can employ a number of strategies to boost their IT performance.
At IBM's China Research Lab (CRL), staff engineer Xing Fang is working with the IBM high performance on demand (HiPODS) team to devise targeted strategies that can help IBM Global Business Services clients and others boost their IT performance through a variety of strategies, such as rebalancing computing functions to streamline operations. Xing joined IBM in 2004 and when CRL joined with HiPODS in 2005 to form the HiPODS China Lab, Xing became a member of the new organization, lending his expertise in performance modeling and tuning to creating innovative solutions.
"My current research focus is performance methodology," says Xing. "Performance is a universal problem for all IT systems. It is not limited to any specific industry. Because each application or solution may have a different performance requirement or problem, many of our clients require a custom solution. The challenge is to find the best way to boost performance in each specialized situation. If we can come up with a universal methodology for performance related work, the need to tailor each strategy individually would be eliminated. The key is methodology – if we can develop a uniform performance methodology, it could be implemented in most of these cases."
In a recent engagement, Xing worked with consultants from IBM Global Business Services to analyze a GBS client's e-commerce IT operations and provide a solution for reducing bandwidth demand at the busiest times and improving Web site stability. The goal was to boost the client's Web site performance without having to upgrade their hardware or software. The HiPODS solution helped to streamline the Web site functions by refreshing only those parts of the pages that changed, rather than the whole page, and eliminating reproduction of white space where possible. The result has been faster page loading, improved customer experience and a dramatic reduction in Web server crashes.
Xing anticipates that this type of assistance will be needed by future clients in a number of fields. "IT will be more mature in the future," says Xing. "For each IT vendor, performance will be a key differentiator for its product. IBM's efforts to develop a well-documented and easy-to-use performance methodology has benefited the service business and enabled IBM to assist more clients in addressing their performance issues."
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