Watchfire Corp.

Category: Web site management
Location: Waltham, Mass.
Technology: WebXM

How it works: WebXM scans every page of a company's Web site, seeking violations of preset policies or regulations. The suite includes three components: QualityXM addresses problems such as standards noncompliance, broken links or forms, slow-loading pages and faulty purchase checkouts. PrivacyXM identifies data collection, privacy policy linking, user-tracking practices and other privacy-related matters. AccessibilityXM checks for compliance with government standards and the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which regulate Web accessibility for the handicapped.

Customer sampling: Corning Inc., The McGraw-Hill Cos., The Reader's Digest Association Inc., AXA Financial Inc.

Tip: SunTrust Banks Inc. first purchased WebXM as a service in order to get up and running quickly and to evaluate the product's usefulness, says Monica Champion, senior vice president of Internet and e-business. Once SunTrust became a believer, Champion switched to a perpetual license to save money in the long run.

What's in store: Gartner Inc. analyst Lou Latham expects Watchfire to benefit from stringent regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 because companies will keep a closer eye on all external communications. He also predicts that "we'll see a combination of [tools like WebXM] and business-focused software that tracks such things as Web site metrics and site usage statistics."

User Profile

Why tell when you can show?

Monica Champion opens Watchfire's WebXM and clicks Scan. In minutes, the software finds a Web page advertising an auto race sponsored by Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks Inc., where Champion is senior vice president of Internet and e-business. The race has been over for weeks, but the Web page is still up. Not for long.

The goal of WebXM is to automate a task that has become practically impossible to perform manually—quality-checking enterprise Web sites. Corporate sites are just too vast (IBM's is said to run about 10 million pages) and content comes from too many sources for conventional quality assurance.

SunTrust uses Watchfire's QualityXM and PrivacyXM modules. The latter initially caught Champion's eye in 2002. Like all financial services firms, SunTrust faces ever-increasing regulation regarding consumer privacy. "Fed regulations, state regulations, the SEC, it's just impossible to protect your customers" without automation, she says.

Cross-branding and linking further complicates matters. If your company links to another Web site that violates your stated customer-privacy policies, you may be in legal hot water. "SunTrust is everywhere," Champion says. "I'm out there [linking to] a lot of third parties—I need to know about their privacy policies. It's impossible with human beings."

The QualityXM module, which Watchfire claims is used by more than half of the Fortune 500, stands to pay for itself rapidly by alerting users to broken links, slow pages and faulty checkouts—problems that can alienate customers. Watchfire founder and Chief Technology Officer Michael Weider says the software works with any server and operating environment. And its drag on network performance is negligible: It's "equivalent to three or four users," he says.

Watchfire's value became abundantly clear to Champion in 2002, shortly after she implemented PrivacyXM. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta audited SunTrust's Internet operations, and the bank passed with flying colors. "They were applauding me for having this," she says.

Applause from regulators? Sounds like a persuasive argument.

Ulfelder is a freelance writer in Southboro, Mass. Contact him at sulfelder@charter.net.



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Image credit: Stan Kaady