Crutchfield Corp. Turns to Identify’s AppSight Black Box to Better Manage Support of Core Business Applications as Business Expands
Leading consumer electronics retailer reduces IT costs, increases web site availability
NEW YORK, April 25, 2005 – Identify Software, the leader in application problem resolution software, today announced that Crutchfield Corp., (Charlottesville, Va.), one of the nation’s largest consumer electronics retailers, has deployed Identify’s AppSight™ Black Box Application Flight Recorder software to quickly resolve application problems for key, business critical applications, as well as to provide testing and monitoring support during a large scale migration to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).
Crutchfield has experienced significant growth over the past few years. In 2003, Crutchfield shipped its one millionth Web order and in 2004, the company’s online sales continued to sustain patterns of sharp growth as additional brands were added to the crutchfield.com site. The company wanted to make sure that it maintained its commitment to provide superior consumer service and satisfaction as its business continued to expand. In November, 2004, Crutchfield deployed Identify's AppSight as a strategic solution that allows the company’s IT support team to resolve software application problems more quickly across the application lifecycle. This resulted in increased availability of critical, customer-facing applications, while reducing IT support costs.
"AppSight gives us insight into our applications that isn’t readily available with any other tool. Because we can find and fix such a wide range of application problems more quickly, we can maintain a reliable technology infrastructure as our business continues to expand,” said Crutchfield’s acting CIO Steve Weiskircher. "AppSight’s innovative Black Box technology has helped us shrink the time between problem discovery to problem diagnosis significantly."
AppSight Black Box software technology monitors application execution and captures a synchronized, real-time log of user actions, system events, performance metrics, configuration data, and code execution flow – much like the "black box” flight recorder on an aircraft captures a real-time record of a flight. The AppSight Black Box log can be replayed and analyzed to quickly pinpoint the root cause of all kinds of application problems, whether related to performance, configuration issues, user mistakes, or code errors. Because AppSight allows IT professionals to simply replay, rather than recreate the problem, it eliminates up to 70 percent of the cycle time traditionally consumed by root cause analysis.
In addition to using the technology in its production Web applications, Crutchfield leveraged AppSight to prepare its applications for a migration to Windows XP Service Pack 2. This migration can be challenging because SP2's new security features may block certain components from talking to others, causing an application to fail or run poorly. Crutchfield relied upon AppSight to analyze application behavior and relevant infrastructure relationships and quickly pinpoint the root cause of problems that occurred with SP2.
"Since 85 percent of Crutchfield’s applications were custom-created and integrate with third-party products that have not yet been tested on SP2, our SP2 migration process would have taken several months, perhaps more than a year, to complete without AppSight. However, by using AppSight, we were able to validate all applications for our largest business unit, the contact center, in just one month,” said Weiskircher.
Read story published in InformationWeek
About Identify Software
Identify® is the leader in application problem resolution software, helping hundreds of enterprises and software vendors speed application delivery, increase application quality, performance, and availability, and reduce application support costs. The company’s AppSight Application Problem Resolution System leverages patented Black Box technology to monitor application execution and to capture, communicate, and determine the root cause of application problems, thereby dramatically accelerating problem resolution processes across the application lifecycle.
Founded in 1996, Identify is a global organization, with operational headquarters in New York and offices in Israel and throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific. For more information about Identify, please visit www.identify.com or call 800.364.5467.
About Crutchfield Corp.
Founded in 1974, Crutchfield Corporation is the nation's largest direct integrated marketer (catalog, call center, and Internet) of consumer electronics products. It offers a convenient, full-service shopping destination to buyers of car and home audio/video products. Providing an unprecedented level of customer service, Crutchfield is noted for its high integrity, product expertise, and technical support. Mailed to approximately 7.5 million households, Crutchfield's catalogs include comprehensive explanations of product and technology intended to help consumers make informed buying decisions. Crutchfield was the first authorized audio/video retailer on the Internet, launching its Web site (www.crutchfield.com) in the summer of 1995.
Media Contacts
Betsy Graham
Identify Software
919 878 3717 x239
Karen Pantinas
PAN Communications
978.474.1900
Identify@pancomm.com
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