Mercury Interactive Topaz keeps tabs on S&P's content
"No one wants to read what happened on the stock market three days ago. They want to know what's happening today, and what's going to happen tomorrow," says Brian Whitehead, vice president and chief technology architect at Standard & Poor's. "A story has a shelf life of one day, max."
In this kind of demanding environment, the S&P Investment Services group needed a monitoring tool to watch the feeds to its numerous Web sites and trigger alerts to the IT and editorial staffs when errors occur in the posting and updating schedules. After looking at other monitoring services, the group decided to go with Mercury Interactive's Topaz to monitor the Web sites. "Topaz was the only software solution which gave us complete control over the implementation," he says. "The others were ASP services."
"We've been able to identify problems in advance of our customers seeing them, and been able to fix those before they became a customer problem," Whitehead says. "That's been invaluable in improving the service level for our customers." Before, customers found the problems first. Better editorial deadlines and workflow processes have generated most of the improvements in the back-office functionality. The reliability of the hardware really hasn't been an issue, he says.
The Topaz monitoring tool ensures that each story gets updated by the editorial staff six or seven times a day, Whitehead explains. "If deadlines are missed for technical or human reasons, there are all kinds of alarms that go off to make sure we get fully updated and back on schedule." Topaz monitors the work that flows from more than 150 editors who write stories on the world's financial markets. "Our editorial systems run 24x7, and pass the book around the world, following the sun, to keep the content fresh all the time," he says.
More recently, the IS group has been using Topaz to monitor the Web sites themselves. "We use it to measure response times of the Web pages, but that's really a secondary use of the tool," Whitehead says.