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HIGH-TECH MARKETPLACE
SUPERIOR - If you've ever abandoned a virtual shopping cart before clicking the "charge" button, you're not alone. Both Boston-based industry analyst firm Boston Consulting Group and online-rating company BizRate.com estimate about one-third of attempted online purchases fail.
Even worse, if you've ever had to call a company's help desk because its Web site was slow or down, you're actually in the majority. According to a July Network World/Packeteer survey, 73 percent of companies first learn about Web performance problems from end-user calls to the help desk.
Xaffire Inc. to the rescue.
Superior-based Xaffire is an application performance management company that measures network performance and helps information technology staff members fix the problems inherent in running applications over networks.
Xaffire was founded by entrepreneurial Wunderkind Rich Schmelzer. The company president and chief executive has founded and sold sk high-tech companies during his career. His most recent success was the $75 million sale of Boulder-based Worldprints.com to the now-defunct Excite in 2000.
Application performance management is an area of software and services that has taken off during the past few years.
As more companies rely on Web-based applications to perform more business processes, keeping those applications running smoothly becomes more important to the bottom line. But as those applications become more complicated - negotiating a complex web of application servers, Web servers, database servers and legacy mainframe computers that runs over a tangled worldwide network-managing them becomes complicated, timeconsuming and expensive.
"It's an area that's getting...