Metrics for the Internet Age: Quality of Experience and Quality of Business

The primary topic of this report is ‘metrics.’ More specifically, we discuss quantitative metrics for evaluating Internet services: what should we quantify, monitor and analyze in order to characterize, evaluate and manage services offered over the Internet? We argue that the focus must be on quality-of-experience and, what we call, quality-of-business metrics. These QoE and QoBiz metrics quantify the user experience and the business return, respectively, and are increasingly important and tractable in the Internet age. We introduce a QoBiz evaluation framework, responding to the emergence of three types of services that impact quantitative evaluation: business to consumer services, business to business services, and service utility through service providers. The resulting framework opens avenues for systematic modeling and analysis methodology for evaluating Internet services, not unlike the advances made over the past two decades in the area of performability evaluation.