Online insurance company esure has employed a Wily web
performance management tool from Computer Associates to ensure its
website availability remained close to 100% throughout its summer
sale, despite peaks in CPU demand created by an online marketing
partner regularly screen scraping its websites.
The insurer runs J Sainsbury's motor insurance website, but it
also sells the group's insurance policies through online aggregator
Moneysupermarket - a website that enables customers to compare
insurance premiums.
Moneysupermarket uses screen-scraping to extract data, which
puts pressure on companies' front-end systems, rather than directly
linking to their back-office systems using XML.
Esure's IT director Mark Foulsham said, "This places very high
loads on us. We get huge CPU spikes if we get requests from
Moneysupermarket.
"Rather than a customer using the website to go from start to
finish with a quote request, the aggregators have to run their
scripts in multiples to switch on some of the different policy
options."
Using the Wily performance management tool, esure managed to
achieve 100% uptime for four of the first nine months of this year.
For the rest of the time, it said its uptime was "close to
100%".
Moneysupermarket is expected to set up XML messaging between its
systems and esure's systems by the end of this year, which will
eliminate the need for screen scraping
Richard Mason, joint managing director at Moneysupermarket,
said, "It is always our preference to have an XML link with an
insurance company.
"XML can be more robust because it removes the pressure on the
web front end."
www.xml.com
www.w3c.org/XML
What are screen scrapers?
Website pages contain a wealth of useful data but they are
usually designed for human consumption, mixing images and
multimedia with text. Screen scrapers extract the machine-friendly
text data from the web-page display. The emergence of XML means
that screen scraping can be eliminated.