TeaLeaf’s RealiTea software keeps apps humming at MarthaStewart.com

Sharpening up online marketing efforts takes time and focus--so does fixing applications on a marketer’s site that aren’t working like they’re supposed to. Martha Stewwart.com tells Internet Retailer it’s freed up more time for the former by putting TeaLeaf Technology Inc.’s web application management software to work on the latter.

The RealiTea software’s is helping the site prevent lost sales, boost conversion rates, and increase customer retention by capturing and correlating data on applications errors and performance, allowing it to reproduce, isolate, and diagnose any potential application-level problems, according to Rafaelle Pisacane vice president of Internet development at site operator Martha Stewart Omnimedia Inc.

Adds John Carton, director of network operations and infrastructure at Martha Stewart, “We have greater efficiency in the discovery phase. It allows us more resource time toward solutions and enhancements that support our business programs.”

In resolving an applications error or attempting to determine whether any changes deliberately made to the site could cause an application-level glitch, it’s identifying the precise source of a problem, rather than actually fixing it, that tends to require more time and resources of the IT department.

TeaLeaf’s RealiTea application management software recreates sessions to provide visibility into what the user does and sees, the context to replicate what led to the problem, and the means to correlate the error back to the individual user or users affected. It’s substantially reduced MarthaStewart.com`s mean time to repair—that is, the total time from detection of an applications problem to resolution—from days to hours, according to Carton, and raised its web transaction success rate. “It gives us increased confidence in gauging whether an alteration to the site is an issue or a non-issue, and ensures our application layer does what it should,” he says.