High-end Website Activity Analysis

Jonathan Bright
Andromedia

Abstract

As corporate web sites become increasingly complex and increasingly important to the success of a company, the need for tools to help analyze how Internet users actually interact with a web site is becoming correspondingly important.

The need for such tools goes beyond simple log-file based analysis which only counts individual page hits. Today's web site marketeers and administrators need to know how people reach their web site, where they came from, and detailed information regarding what they actually do once they are there.

Andromedia is the leading supplier of real-time web site activity analysis products. The company recently secured an additional $10 million in equity financing, and its customers include Sony Corporation, Sun Microsystems, iVillage, the U.S. Postal Service, among many others.

This talk will cover:

  1. Brief history of Andromedia, featuring "the unpredictable life of a startup"
  2. Features of Aria 2.5, Andromedia's most recent product release
  3. Architecture of Aria 2.5, designed for both flexibility and high performance
  4. Anticipating future market trends

Biography

Jonathan Bright received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, where his research was in the area of fault-tolerant data structures. Afterwards, he spent a year in a postdoctoral position at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, working on a simulator for wireless networks.

After his postdoctoral position, he moved to the Bay Area where he joined Illustra, which was soon thereafter acquired by Informix. At Informix, he served as the project lead for the Informix Optimizer at the Oakland location. He currently does development work on the the backend database recorder portion of Andromedia's Aria product, and in his spare time, he evangelizes Aria product offering to willing and not so willing audiences.