More than 10 years ago, Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. In 2006, Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. A broker could lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition.

Since these data points were published, our digital world has accelerated exponentially. COVID 19 changed the way we do business. Enterprises that did not have an online presence, or offered a poor online experience, fought to survive. 

It is clear, that the need for speed and scale have escalated dramatically.  Enterprises need to understand how they can support current and future applications to remain competitive in all aspects: optimized operations, regulation adherence and enhanced customer experience.

Consumerization has also heavily impacted our expectations of our online experience. It is a given that customer facing services need offer a sublime experience to remain competitive. But as digital modernization has ramped up, internal stakeholders in organizations expect the same ease of use and intuitivity that they get as consumers. 

Digital services are driven by data. Not any data. Data that can be delivered to apps continuously, in real time, so that the info customers get – and the transactions they carry out – can be executed in seconds. 

Below are some statistics that drive home the connection between the cost of low latency for the user experience and how it translates into revenue – or conversely can lead to loss of revenue.

Solution brief: Learn how to accelerate innovation and shorten the development cycles of new digital services >>

Fast forward to 2023
70% of mobile app users will abandon an app if it is taking too long to load ((Source: Think Storage Now)

53% of your site visitors will leave if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. 

Since Amazon first talked about latency in seconds and milliseconds, the situation hasn’t gotten any easier for online retailers. In the era of high speed Internet, user experience is even more critical to e-commerce success than it was in the past.

According to Advertising Week, Satisfied customers are more likely to spend up to 140% more and recommend companies to others when they feel valued and appreciated.

Figure 1: Mobile page load industry benchmarks

Latency is not an option anymore
The less interactive a site becomes the more likely users are to simply click away to a competitor’s site. Latency is the mother of interactivity.

Additionally, as enterprises start leveraging real-time analytics for personalized recommendations and dynamic pricing services, speed is becoming even more imperative.

How do we recover that which is most meaningful–sales–and build highly available, low-latency systems that scale and at the same time retain performance?
The first thing to understand is that Tier Based Architectures with their mishmash of separate cluster implementations are not only state bound at each tier but are also complex to manage and maintain. The ability to unify real-time analytics and extreme transactional processing further simplifies the architecture, leveraging the scalable distributed in-memory computing fabric for low latency performance.

A great example can be seen from a customer of ours, PriceRunner, who has designed their architecture to flexibly and quickly scale out when necessary without compromising performance and speed. This past Black Friday, when visitor traffic peaked at 20 times higher, in parallel with 100 million price updates, PriceRunner response time for the 95th percentile of the product page endpoint remained within the 5-8 millisecond range.

See how a global airline provides real-time flight availability and forecasting services to 400 air transport members

If you are interested to explore how to scale up your architecture to meet the massive demand for high performance, digital applications, you can click here.