News

GP Bullhound recognises Intechnica’s growth on new Northern Tech Map

Intechnica is on the map of growing tech businesses in the North, according to leading independent advisory firm GP Bullhound.

Intechnica is featured in GP Bullhound’s newly launched Northern Tech Map, an interactive tool pulling data from years of research into the growing northern tech movement.

This follows on from Intechnica being named as one of GP Bullhound’s top 50 fastest growing tech businesses in the Northern Tech Awards 2016, alongside businesses like Skyscanner, Metronet, TyreOnTheDrive and TheLADBible.

This has been bolstered by the growth of Intechnica’s TrafficDefender SaaS solution, which has helped clients such as AO World and JD Williams ensure their websites remain online during their busiest sales peaks, as well as Intechnica’s professional services around performance and development.

Intechnica has also become a trusted advisor for businesses during mergers and acquisitions via expert IT due diligence services, working on valuations worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

Click here to view the GP Bullhound Northern Tech Map, here to find out about TrafficDefender, or here to find out about Intechnica’s services.

Are celebrity endorsements doing more harm than good to your retail sales?

Online retailers exploring the recent trend of signing up celebrities to endorse them to their millions of followers on social media run the risk of site-melting bursts of traffic, according to Intechnica co-founder Jeremy Gidlow.

In a talk at GP Bullhound’s event “Online Fashion: Where is the smart money going?” last night, Jeremy pointed to a recent example where Kylie Jenner drove an incredible amount of demand to the website selling her range of lipstick. However, because the demand was so great and was directed at a specific time, the systems behind the website couldn’t cope and the whole website was brought down.

This highlighted a common problem retailers are facing today: Sales reduce margins whilst increasing demand, and the technology needed to cope with the increased demand can be very costly – further cutting into profits.

TrafficDefender is a SaaS solution developed by Intechnica in response to this problem. TrafficDefender allows retail websites to remain online throughout large spikes in web traffic without needing to over invest in additional IT infrastructure.

Watch Jeremy’s talk below or find out more about TrafficDefender.

Intechnica to reveal results of four years of monitoring Grand National betting sites and apps

Intechnica, the IT Performance Experts, will reveal the results of four years worth of end-user experience monitoring of the Grand National in a live webinar taking place on Thursday 12th May.

The Grand National drives the largest spike in traffic seen by betting websites and apps each year, with half the adult population of the UK placing a bet on the race.

Each year, many sites are troubled by traffic-related issues and errors caused by the massive interest generated by the Grand National, as evidenced by Intechnica’s monitoring activities since 2013. Common errors include missing content, slow pages and periods of unavailability.

Now, Intechnica are poised to reveal how the market has responded to this challenge, and will once again present findings in a live webinar.

The webinar takes place at 11am BST on Thursday May 12th and is free to attend.

Click here to register.

Intechnica in the top 50 fastest growing tech companies in GP Bullhound Northern Tech Awards 2016

Intechnica are proud to be finalists in the GP Bullhound Northern Tech Awards 2016.

Intechnica joins finalists such as UKFast, Sky Betting & Gaming, Missguided and Skyscanner as one of the top 50 fastest growing tech companies in the north.

The nomination recognises Intechnica’s growth over the past few years, and in particular the growth of TrafficDefender, our innovative traffic management and queuing SaaS product, which has been adopted by businesses like AO.com and JD Williams.

The awards ceremony takes place in Liverpool – watch this space for more information.

Join us at #VelocityConf!

For the third year running, Intechnica are sponsoring Velocity Conference in Europe – this year taking place in Amsterdam.

Velocity is the premier Web Performance and Operation conference, with a schedule packed with the cutting edge of web performance topics and discussions.

If you are attending, be sure to drop by stand 426 on Thursday or Friday, where you can talk to us about:

Managed Performance Testing – Delivering a more a consistent, expertly managed performance test resource
APM Managed Service – Get the most value and benefit possible from an investment in Application Performance Management tools
TrafficDefender – Guarantee website uptime and performance at peak times such as Black Friday sales with our traffic management and visitor queuing solution

Not got your pass yet?

Use our discount code Intechnica25 for 25% off your pass!

Click here to register

Preparing for Peaks at AO.com

In one of the sessions taking place during Velocity, Adam Warne (Director of IT Services at AO.com) will talk about how the UK’s largest online white goods retailer prepares for peaks in traffic by using information to build the right architecture.

This talk is taking place on Thursday 29th October at 17:05 in room G109.

Not attending Velocity? Join a live webinar

Adam will also be presenting his talk in a live webinar on Thursday 5th November, 6pm GMT.

Click here to register

Webinar: Preparing for peaks at AO.com

O’Reilly are hosting an exclusive webinar with AO.com on (remember remember) 5th November, which is sponsored by TrafficDefender.

As with every online retailer, Black Friday has posed many challenges to AO.com. Building a platform to serve an unknown number of customers can be an onerous and expensive task. But what if you have limited time or budget? Using the right tools and techniques to produce and understand data can lead to more predictable results whilst delivering the best solution possible for your customers.

Click here to register for this free O’Reilly webinar

Thursday 5th November
6pm GMT | 1pm ET | 10am PT

Key takeaways from this webcast include:

The key principles of platforms and how these relate to your overall business goals
The relationship monitoring & analytics of customer experience should have with infrastructure planning
The must-know checklist of preparing your technology for peak web traffic

About Adam Warne, Director of IT Services — ao.com

AO.com is the UK’s largest online white good retailer, supplying more than 4.5m customers, and household names such as B&Q, Boots and House of Fraser. Adam Warne has been with AO.com for 8 years and has been part of its growth into the successful international retailer it is today. Adam’s previous experience includes delivering IT services at EDS and Skipton Building Society.

TrafficDefender helps Poundworld Plus website stay online during BBC One programme

This article was originally posted on our brand new TrafficDefender website over at http://www.traffic-defender.co.uk – click to read the original now.

For the past eight weeks, the BBC One series “Pound Shop Wars” has followed the plight of the pound shop industry. In last night’s episode, “Battles in Cyberspace”, the programme focused on the ecommerce websites operated by the major pound shops, including poundworldplus.co.uk and poundworld.com.

Predictably this caused a huge increase in awareness and interest in the websites mentioned on the programme, driving massive amounts of traffic to each. This was enough to cause problems for the servers at the Poundshop, not giving the best impression to would-be visitors.

Thankfully for Poundworld Plus, they had prepared for the TV exposure by implementing TrafficDefender in front of their website.

This meant that the site was able to allow as many visitors in as its servers could comfortably cope with, while placing excess new visitors into an orderly queue. So instead of a screen like the above displayed by the rival Poundshop, Poundworld Plus visitors either got straight through to the site or saw a screen like this (courtesy of Twitter user @Citybird2012):

This was a much better result for Poundworld Plus because it meant that they could control the amount of traffic hitting their servers at any given time, so as not to overwhelm them and bring the site down for existing visitors. They could even change the threshold at which the site began to queue visitors on-the-fly if they felt the site was coping better or worse than expected.

As for the visitors themselves, as you can see they had a much clearer idea of what was happening thanks to the custom branded queue page, rather than a garbled error page.

With Black Friday shaping up to be bigger than ever this year, how many retailers are prepared for the unpredictable amount of traffic heading for their websites? Find out more about getting TrafficDefender in time now.

Intechnica are sponsoring Velocity Conference in New York and Amsterdam – Get 25% off your pass

We’re happy to announce that Intechnica are now silver sponsors for the O’Reilly Velocity Conference 2015, both in New York (12-14 October) and Amsterdam (28-30 October).

This marks the third consecutive year Intechnica has sponsored Velocity in Europe, having exhibited in London in 2013 and Barcelona in 2014, but will be the first time Intechnica have sponsored the conference in the United States. This supports the company’s recent expansion into the States following investment into its TrafficDefender web traffic management product.

As sponsors we’re happy to be able to offer a discount code for 25% off passes to each conference. Simply use the code Intechnica25 when ordering your pass to apply the discount.

Stay tuned for more information on our involvement in both New York and Amsterdam!

Introducing the Intechnica Performance Podcast

We’re very pleased to announce the launch of the Intechnica Performance Podcast!

This will be a short weekly video podcast featuring best practice tips from our Performance experts, with a different theme being covered each month across four individual episodes.

The first episode is already available on iTunes and is part one this month’s theme, “Performance Analysis”. It’s hosted by Intechnica’s Head of Performance and author of “The Art of Application Performance Testing”, Ian Molyneaux, and covers script design and analysis tips.

Be sure to subscribe to keep up to date with the latest episodes, and leave your comments via this post, email or Twitter if you have any questions or comments.