DCI Provides Holiday Incentive to Retailers for Charitable Donations

What effect has the economic downturn had on charitable contributions? With corporate revenues down, it's reasonable to assume that corporate giving is also suffering. Now, in an effort to reward benevolence and further extend goodwill, a company in San Francisco called Distributed Computing, Inc. (DCI) is encouraging corporations to rise to the occasion by donating $50,000 worth of its services to online retailers as reward for donations to the Salvation Army. DCI is offering to match online retailers' donations to the Salvation Army during the month of December with an equal value of DCI's Capacity Calibration™ (CapCal™) Web load testing services. The minimum donation required is $1000 and the maximum services offered to any one retailer will be $5,000. DCI is allocating $50,000 of its services to this program for the Salvation Army and is open to help other charitable organizations with this program as well.
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The holiday shopping season is the busiest time of the year, not only for retail stores but for charitable organizations as well. A crowded parking lot with Salvation Army volunteers ringing their bells at the store entrance is a scene with which we are all familiar. What is not so familiar, however, is the online equivalent of this scene. And as more and more customers turn to the Web to make their holiday gift purchases, a Web site can attract as much traffic and become as congested and slow as a crowded parking lot. The resulting frustration can be far more devastating to an online retailer's bottom line, as impatient customers depart more quickly, abandoning their purchases with a single click. Of course in cyberspace, we also are not greeted, coming or going, with the smiling, bell-ringing volunteers.

Enter the costly and arcane technology called Web load testing, which provides a way to verify that an e-tailer can handle the rush of holiday visitors without the site slowing to a crawl or crashing altogether. Typically requiring a six-figure investment in software, dedicated hardware and highly skilled consultants to simulate even a few hundred simultaneous visitors, load testing has historically been kept out of the reach of all but the largest companies. DCI has introduced new technology that solves these problems. Now Web performance and capacity can be tested very cost-effectively and with greater simplicity, making available these services to all size companies, and DCI has chosen this Christmas season, in the spirit of giving, as the ideal way to make its announcement public.

Using a distributed network of agent computers from desktops in homes and offices around the country and the world, DCI's Capacity Calibration™ or CapCal™ online service provides a way to measure the capacity of any Web site realistically, affordably and easily. And instead of having to hire expensive consultants to develop complex testing scripts, actual customer sessions are recorded and used to create visitor traffic to illustrate exactly what happens in real life rather than simulating it in a computer lab.

To make its point in a way that benefits retailers, holiday shoppers and charitable organizations alike, DCI is offering to match online retailers' donations to the Salvation Army during the month of December with an equal value of CapCal™ services. The minimum donation required is $1000 and the maximum services offered to any one retailer will be $5,000. DCI is allocating $50,000 of its ExerSite™ services to this program for the Salvation Army and is open to help other charitable organizations with a similar program as well.

To find out more, please visit www.capcal.com/2002HolidayGiving.asp



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