When your site is technically “up” but takes too long to load, customers don’t care—it might as well be down. Why is “slow” the new “down”, and how is that reshaping the way organizations think about digital experience?
Today I’m joined by Gerardo Dada, Chief Marketing Officer at Catchpoint, a leader in digital experience monitoring. Gerardo recently helped launch the 2025 SRE Report, which delivers some surprising insights—most notably, that 53% of organizations now view poor performance as just as damaging as actual downtime. Catchpoint is also leading innovation in observability with tools like their new AI-powered Internet Outage Map, and Gerardo’s here to talk about what it all means for digital-first organizations.
Resources
Catchpoint: https://www.catchpoint.com
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
When your site is technically up, but it takes too long to load, customers don’t care. It might as well be down. Why is slow the new down and how is that reshaping the way organizations think about digital experience? Today, I’m joined by Gerardo Dada, Chief Marketing Officer at Catchpoint, a leader in digital experience monitoring. Gerardo recently helped launch the 2025 SRE report, which delivers some surprising insights, most notably that 53 % of organizations now view poor performance
as just as damaging as actual downtime. Catchpoint is also leading innovation and observability with tools like their AI powered internet outage map. And Gerardo is here to talk about what it all means for digital first organizations. Gerardo, welcome back to the show.
Gerardo Dada (00:43)
Thank you, Greg. It’s a pleasure. I’m happy to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom (00:45)
Yeah, yeah, looking forward to talking with you again. But for those that didn’t catch you last time you’re on the show, why don’t you give some background on yourself and your role as well as what catch point does.
Gerardo Dada (00:54)
Sure, I’ve been a technology marketer for all my life and I’ve been also a very technical marketer, which is important, I think, when you market complex technology to really understand your audience. I come from a product marketing background, but I’m a marketer at heart with a business mindset. I think that’s also something that’s helped me a lot in my career. I used to be an entrepreneur, so I look at things from a business perspective and that’s been super helpful.
Catchpoint is a company that’s been around for 15 years and I joined them about two and a half years ago. And when I was looking for my next opportunity as a marketer, I told recruiters, I’m looking for a company with great technology and bad marketing. So I don’t want to be doing good marketing and bad technology, but you know, there’s so much opportunity when you see something that has a ton of value, but it was not being communicated effectively. Right. So.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:36)
Ha ha.
Gerardo Dada (01:47)
What Catchpoint does really create a category called Internet Performance Monitoring, which is basically the concept that today everything depends on the Internet and companies need to be able to have resilient digital technology. So Catchpoint measures, monitors and alerts people of anything that happens on their technology stack. And it’s great to be in a company that is trusted by all the top e-commerce platforms, all the top technology providers like the cloud providers a bunch of SaaS companies, seven out of the top 10 software companies and 13 of the top 20 brands in the world.
Greg Kihlstrom (02:20)
Great, great. Well, yeah, let’s dive in here. And I want to start by talking about the report. So the 2025 SRE report, a couple of things there. mean, first, I want to dig into that key stat that 53 % of organizations say that poor performance is as harmful as downtime. What is this signal about the evolution of digital expectations?
Gerardo Dada (02:44)
Well, you know, there used to be a time before websites where you would send communication to a company, you expect a response within days. And then there was a time where the internet was early, that people would wait a couple of minutes for a page to load and if something didn’t work, were patient. But now our world depends on the internet, right? Everything we do is digital. I mean, I was at Rackspace when the cloud first started, we were launching the cloud with Amazon, right? And we were thinking…
You know, restaurants are some of the last, we were thinking about segmentation, which customers to go first or ICP. I thought restaurants are going to be the last ones to adopt the cloud. But even now, imagine you use Yelp to find where you’re to eat. You use Google Maps to get there. You scan a QR code to get the menu. The server is at some restaurant management software. And then to pay, you need to have payment processing that requires multiple systems to work. So if the internet is down,
you can’t go out and have a good dining experience, right? So it’s really depend… Our entire lives depend on the internet. And that’s why, you know, some years ago people would be okay with a website loading in seven seconds. Now the expectation is it’s gonna load in under three seconds, right? Google has made it for long time, part of what they call the Core Web Vitals. That is basically how they measure the technical capabilities of a website.
that are taking into account for SEO because they know that it’s not, people are not patient anymore. Even think about today, right? Like we all use different LLMs, right? And we’re playing, I’m playing with, know, every time I have like, hey, I need to summarize this article. I hyper-editory write this. I have a copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity. Those are the three I use. And I go put the same prompt in one, put the same prompt in second one, put the same prompt in the third. Go back to the first one, this is only like a second later. And if it’s still thinking about it’s like, it’s broken.
Greg Kihlstrom (04:31)
Right.
Gerardo Dada (04:32)
Like that’s it. It’s so simple nowadays that if something doesn’t work, you switch to something else, right? I need to buy a new set of speakers, put them on the ceiling in my house. And you know, I go to Best Buy, type in the speaker model. After two seconds, I go like, hmm, what’s going on? At three seconds, close the window, go to Amazon. You’ve lost me, done. And by the time I’ve done that twice, I’m not going back to bestbuy.com, right?
So it’s critical. The point is like, if your website or your deal experience are slow, then it’s just as good as if they’re not working at all. Like I was looking at a Salesforce research report that interviewed a couple thousand people. Digital banking experience is the number one reason today why people switch financial institutions. So if your bank application is slow, you’re trying to send money to somebody, you’re a company, you’re trying to pay your employees or I’m trying to pay the guy who’s going to install my speakers. If my experience is low, I cannot log in, which takes me a long time. It’s what the garden calls digital friction. Then I might think like, maybe I need another bag that actually can make my life easier. I don’t have to be waiting three seconds on the app. Sounds ridiculous, but that’s the reality.
Greg Kihlstrom (05:39)
Yeah, no, it’s true. I mean, you know, I think this is where the it kind of cuts both ways, right? Because, the the subscription model that a lot of businesses have moved to make it easy to switch the even in banking, it’s not quite, you know, as easy as signing up for a subscription, but it is easier than ever to switch banks. And yet, poor digital performance also gives a reason to switch easier than than ever. And so it’s yeah, I would imagine that
the friction, there’s friction, but there’s also it’s easier to change vendors or even just to use the restaurant example, very easy. You’re hungry and the menu doesn’t load quickly enough. You’re not going back to that restaurant. If it’s a QR code, you’re hungry, you’re whatever, you’re hangry, whatever. That’s a bad experience. Or the reservations don’t load quickly enough in the first place and you never show up there. So definitely a lot of implications from a business consequence. mean, is things like switching and sales, mean, what are the kind of the breadth of business consequences that companies are facing from this poor experience?
Gerardo Dada (06:48)
Also, it ranges from the catastrophic, like you can imagine, you can remember probably what happened three years ago when Facebook meta was having a problem in the internet. It was a technology called BGP that honestly I didn’t even know that existed. It’s something that’s basically like the sitcom system of the internet and a company size of, you know, we are actually talking to the health division of a university who’s monitoring their BGP.
it’s like checking email, the same thing. It’s just like all internet goes through that system. So man, I was one of those companies that thought like, maybe this is not that or nothing’s happened in last few years. So we’re okay. Right. then everything crashed. Like there was a day where for eight hours, nobody was able to access Instagram or Facebook or, what was the other one? Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, right? Everything was down all over the world. was a lot of the news.
And the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, which was very clear because, know, as an advertiser, people browsing is your inventory, right? So if nobody browses for a day, you lost all that inventory and the ability to sell sort of all those assets. You lost all that revenue forever, never coming back. But also they lost a lot of trust, right? So they were competing with other properties like Snapchat, I think at the moment, and TikTok and others.
And if you’re frustrated because you cannot post online or you’re an influencer and that’s your livelihood, you start thinking about alternatives. And that’s why we say it’s a board level impact, right? Because it went all the way to the board. now MEDA is one of our customers and they are doing all the right monitoring for the systems globally. So that’s one extreme.
We have other examples like Southwest Star Alliance, you people not being able to get home on the holidays because there was something wrong with the digital systems. And on the other side is what I call the paper cuts. We were working with a large computer manufacturing company also based here in Austin who has thousands of salespeople and there are salespeople complaining all the time. So this is internal usage, right? Like, we cannot access Salesforce or, know, and so it…
When we found the problem that they were having and you save 10 minutes a day to 5,000 employees every single day times 300 days a year, that’s a ton of money in waste of time, waste of frustration. And so from a customer perspective, it can be as simple as look, there’s a, we were started working with a company, hosting company in Europe that serves the entire world. And they said like, once we stole your system, we didn’t know, but there was an area of France where we have a problem in our routing technology and nobody in that area of France was able to visit any of the websites that we have. The companies, their customers, you know, you have an e-commerce store or website, they’re hearing, okay, John, hey, your website is down, right? And you hear from one or two people and they call the host like, no, everything’s good, right? But we know that every time that there’s three people complaining, there’s like 50 behind them that don’t complain, right?
Greg Kihlstrom (09:24)
Wow.
Gerardo Dada (09:42)
Like in my example, I’m not going to open an incident with copilot perplexity because it didn’t load in three seconds. I just want to use something else, right? So you hear five people complaining. People say like, no, these goods must be user error, must be the internet, their home is down or those guys don’t know what they’re doing. Like it’s a typical response from IT. And it’s paper cuts, right? Because you have a lot of those things. We found one of the largest sneaker companies in the world, they were having a problem with, they were not selling enough shoes. And we found that when they, technology that the buy now button or the add to cart button was not rendering on something like 20 % of the pages. And if there’s no buy now button, like again, very, very difficult to diagnose, but it’s just, they lost 20 % of their sales and that is massive. Right.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:30)
And, know, to your point about the this becoming a boardroom topic, you know, recently Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is now recognizing digital experience monitoring. you know, observability, as you’re saying, is not just, you know, relegated to a certain area of the business. It’s being more broadly thought about, talked about, and as you said, lots of very you know, either very large and broad or the paper cut scenario, but all adding up to a lot of, you know, potential at the very least revenue loss, if not, you know, reputation loss and things like that. For those that are still not thinking about this or that this is not top of mind for, you know, what do you say to leaders who think that observability is really just about monitoring uptime?
Gerardo Dada (11:13)
So I think for a lot of time has been mostly about monitoring the code of your website, right? know, Garner, you’re right, they published the first deal experience monitoring, but also within that, they actually called out a category, the category for internet performance monitoring, which has two important differences. One is that it requires you monitoring from where your customers are. Because a lot of this monitoring technologies in the cloud, right? So, okay, so the website looks great from within a cloud, is, as we know, they have a tremendous connectivity and power. My users don’t have the same level of connectivity at home, I wish I did. And then the second thing is being able to understand everything that is impacting from multiple places and internet. Because if you think today, like the typical e-commerce website, you have a headless commerce application, which means you have your content is in one system, your graphics are in another system, your web.
Your front ends might be in different clouds for resilience, and then you have DNS and you have your CDN and your SSL certificates. And then you have an API for payment and you have like, it’s such a complex system. I was looking at CNN the other day. It’s one of the worst or maybe it’s not that necessarily. 625 different calls to different places just to load the website. So if you think the typical e-commerce site probably has, I would say probably over a hundred different dependencies of things that need to work across the internet. We saw it a year ago when Adobe Tag Manager went down. A lot of websites went down because they were not paying attention to it. That’s different, right? If you’re not monitoring this, the Tag Manager goes down and you go like, hey, our website is down. By the time somebody complains, you notice, you start freaking out, you start calling your vendors, you already lost two, three hours of revenue, right? Versus a system that is proactive and suddenly you learn, hey, Adobe Tech Manager is down, turn it up. And when this happened, actually, we had our customers turn off the tech manager temporarily until they fixed the issue 30 minutes before you actually showed up on their status page. So they were not even reporting. So you said, maybe it’s a tech manager. You go to the Adobe status page, it’s green. It must be something else. And you keep looking. So that’s why monitoring is so critical nowadays because
The world is now completely distributed, relying on third parties. And if you’re not paying attention to that, then it’s not a matter of will it happen to you? It’s a matter of when is it going to happen to you? How bad is it going to be? And honestly, who gets fired?
Greg Kihlstrom (13:36)
Right, right. Well, yeah, and I guess this is, there’s a lot of positives about, know, we talk about, you know, composable approaches and all kinds of things like that on the show. Like there’s a lot of positives to that. And there’s also just some, you’re not just going to use a single vendor for your entire digital presence no matter what, but you know, there’s, there seems to be an increase in the number of platforms and vendors used, but, and there’s, there’s efficiencies to be gained there, but it’s also, does that kind of make this problem worse or potentially worse?
Gerardo Dada (14:06)
Yeah, because you know, the problem is, is, know, speaking about audio systems, like, you know, when I was researching, when I was learning about audio systems, the quality of your audio experience is as good as the worst of your components. So think about it, you can have the best recording of Vivaldi’s or Mozart’s symphony with the best CD player. I remember about the single bit Carver CD player, which is the best possible. I had my
BMW speakers, but if your cable is bad, your hour experience is going to be bad, right? Doesn’t matter how much you spend. so the same here, we, as marketers are in love with it with a cool new thing, like, Hey, let’s talk about augmented reality and Facebook commerce and blockchain and all this. And even like personalization, which should be a tool to achieve relevance, not a goal in itself. But then we forget the basics. People cannot go to your website. People cannot complete checkup.
Your pension load times are seven seconds. I I email VVS at e-commerce and we have a tool called WebPageTest that does free tools. anybody listening, webpagetest.org, tap the URL of your website. There’s no registration, no nothing. And you’ll get a report of here’s the speed of your page. Here’s what’s impacting, shows you like a waterfall. Here’s how DNS and you can test from multiple locations. People don’t even pay attention to that, right? That’s the problem.
We sometimes tend to look too far into the future, into the most complex things, for getting the base.
Greg Kihlstrom (15:33)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, speaking of innovations, but you know, practical ones, know, catch point has has come up with a few things. One of those is the AI powered Internet outage map. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it helps solve for some of these things that we’re talking about?
Gerardo Dada (15:50)
So, the best example is we were just launching this when the example I mentioned just happened to me, right? I get a notification on Teams saying, it looks like our website is down. And then I get another person contacting me like five seconds later, I think our website is down. Then we have a marketing channel saying our website is down and then there’s a screenshot. So at that moment, you know, everything stops.
And you go there and you know what typically happens is start contacting your web hosting provider. We use Webflow, we open a tick in the Webflow. I’m starting getting like pings from our CEOs, like our website is really down and then our CTO is like, Hey, what’s going on? Right. you, you, it’s basically craziness, right? When, when, when a massive outage like that happens. So we built using our technology, a system that is checking on hundreds of different things on a continuous basis all over the world from multiple locations. And so, for example, we monitor all the cloud services for all the major cloud providers from, let’s say from, I don’t know, maybe 10 different places from the United States and different countries, et cetera. So I went to this dashboard and it basically said Amazon East is down. I know that’s where our workflow instance is hosted. So there’s no point in me freaking out. There’s no point in me
calling the guys at Webflow, they have nothing to do. I know what the problem is, we just need to wait for it to be fixed, right? Or if we had maybe a more sophisticated website, we could just move our site to a different cloud provider or different availability zone, right? But it’s basically telling you exactly what the problem is. And in fact, if you go today at any point to catchpoint.com slash outages, we show a map of what’s down in the last 24 hours.
Right. So we were, I was giving presentation to e-commerce executives a week ago and said like, let’s look at what’s going on. And then at that moment, Clarna was down to the flexible payment solution. And then there was a, some digital certificates companies down, which is pretty bad. Right. So by the way, that’s one of the things that we talking about the basics, like one of the most, simplest things is SSL certificates. Your SSL certificate on your side expires.
You’re sat down for 24 hours like you’re done. And it’s such a dumb thing, such a simple thing. And, the problem is we see it happen for multi-billion dollar brands all the time. In fact, there’s a very large brand for which we monitor 25,000 sell certificates at the moment. Every single day we check on them, expiration dates, et cetera. Right. So it’s just another example of how simple things can go bad very quickly.
Greg Kihlstrom (18:25)
Yeah, yeah.
Gerardo Dada (18:25)
I forgot to mention the nice thing about this AI thing is that we’re doing tests from we’re doing billions of tests all the time and just because something fails one time is not something that is down. So we use like, okay, let’s test it from another location. What is the trend? How was this last year? How bad is the response time? And we use different algorithms that take like, yeah, this it looked like this is really there’s really a problem with this. It’s not just a one time thing, right? That’s where the AI comes in.
And then we have something that’s called root cause identification. So for our customers, where we map the entire experience from the end user, DNAs, their front end servers, their APIs, their cloud providers, all the way to the back end code, we can, we use AI to the extent, okay, what has changed from the normal status of the system? And what is most likely the root cause of the problem? So we might tell people, look, this part of your website is down. And we think it’s an origin server or Amazon that went down to restore.
Greg Kihlstrom (19:18)
Yeah, well and that from my experience and perspective at least the the root cause analysis part of this is incredibly helpful and you because otherwise you’re You’ve got you know, if this is a major provider that’s down Let’s say then you’ve got countless companies that are all literally trying to do a root cause analysis on their own and with probably varying skill levels and and access to tools and everything like that instead of I mean, to me, this is a great use of AI is like, use this and help a lot of people figure this stuff out and save a lot of emails and inquiries and all that stuff so that either they can do something about it to your earlier point or just know what the problem is and wait for it to get resolved,
Gerardo Dada (20:03)
Yeah, exactly. Because honestly, I’m a skeptical, not a denier. I’m just skeptical AI because there’s a lot of AI talk, right? Like it’s going to do everything. And I’m skeptical in the sense like, okay, let’s see if that’s actually real, if it’s reliable, and it’s something that’s practical, right? So I apply the same things to the things we market about AI. By the way, WebPageTest, we were talking about has a very cool thing called experiments.
So basically as it analyzes your website, and I said like, okay, it looks like this JavaScript is causing a problem. What if we load it asynchronously or lazy loaded or I don’t know, there are a couple of things you can do for JavaScript or a third party library or fonts or something else that might be slowing your website. So our system identifies your website slow number one, two, this might be one of the problems causing it. And three, I think we think if we did this change, we might help it.
So let’s run that experiment. basically clone the website, apply the change from the clone, run the test again, and tell you what’s the actual real world impact of that change without you having to do anything. You don’t even call web team, nobody needs to make any changes. So you can play with multiple changes, run these experiments, by, they’re run by AI, but you’re guiding which experiments you think you want to run based on your particular situation. And it tells you, look,
I’ve seen it very often. I pick two or three things like, okay, that increased page load time by one second. That’s a no brainer. Now you go to your team and it’s like, look, if we do these three things, which oftentimes they’re super simple, our page load time will be improved by one second and our core web battle score, our lighthouse scores are going to improve by 30%, which improves your SEO, which improves your business.
Greg Kihlstrom (21:43)
Right, right. And you don’t have to spend all the time, you know, you’re running virtual scenarios. That’s, yeah, that’s amazing. Well, you know, I guess along those lines, you know, as we kind of wrap up here, I want to ask you a couple things. But, you know, first, what do you see as, you know, what’s coming up next? You know, what do you see as the future of digital experience monitoring? It sounds like, you know, some of the AI things that you’ve mentioned, certainly are going to help tremendously, what do you see digital experience monitoring looking like in 2025 and beyond?
Gerardo Dada (22:11)
One thing that I think is going to be very transformative is the concept of an XLO. We have, especially in technology, when you work with a vendor, you have an SLA, right? Like, hey, I’m going to hire this again. Yeah, I was at Rackspace, we were offered 100 % uptime SLA. And that’s great. It’s a very technology centric, very system centric, right? The concept of XLO is an experience level objective. So imagine if you’re
If you’re bank and you say like, want my users to be able to log into the bank, make a payment and log out or finish the transaction within 10 seconds from a mobile device anywhere in my top 10 cities in United States. So that doesn’t talk about the systems, right? The systems are really need to support this experience. But this is about UI. This is about end user experience, about trust, it’s about, you know, delivering a good service to your customers.
So again, it’s not a website thing, it’s not a mobile application thing. If you are an e-commerce website, so I want people to be able to do a search, add something to a cart, and check out within maybe it’s 20 seconds, right? And the thing is, we can simulate that transaction with something called synthetic marketing, which is basically like a secret shopper for many of our best brands. We do that from multiple places around the United States every five minutes. And then we report on this experience score.
And then you have this, and again, this is nothing about buying cash for you can do this in other ways, right? I think companies need to have, you know, in technology, a of people have like SOC, security operations center, a NOC, network operations center. I think Markers, we need to build a dock, a digital operations center, because everything is digital, right? Like, okay, how’s, if you’re a bank, how are my ATMs? How are my branches? How’s my mobile app? How’s my website? How are my APIs that connect to all this thing, right?
If these are the experiences that are a lifeblood of my business, what is the experience I’m delivering measuring these XLOs? How am I doing as a business and delivering these digital experiences? And then being able to see all this in a digital process. To me, that’s the future of digital, right? Because again, in the past, your website might be 5 % of your sales, and we see every year everything in our lives is becoming more more digital. And it’s only a matter of time to get there.
Greg Kihlstrom (24:22)
Nice. Yeah, agreed. Well, one last question for you. Before we wrap up here, I’d like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Gerardo Dada (24:33)
You know, it’s, think, when I interview people, I asked them about, what is, what are the habits they have to become, to get up to stay up to date. Because it’s not about, Hey, I took this course or I went to a conference. need to build habits that you do all the time. Like I’ll give you an example of a habit. I, when I started working for Rackspace, I live in Austin and Rackspace in San Antonio. said, like, I’m not going to waste all that time driving, listen, you know, making uncles to my friends are listening to rock music, which would be great. I’m going to only listen to audio books. So since that time, since 2010, every time I get on my car on my own, I only listened to audio books. So I’ve listened right now to, I think my account is 450 audio books in the last 15 years. Right. It’s a habit, right? I just do it naturally when I get in my car, I don’t even think about what music it just audible pops up automatically. Right.
So I read a lot on paper as well. I think it’s in marketing, especially is this challenge of how do you separate between the shiny objects, again, Facebook commerce, blockchain, augmented reality and all those things, and the things that are really important. And I think the key is also being super curious about all these things but also being skeptical and being careful not to be enamored with the technology. again, personalization is my best example because we all talk about personalization, but it’s like being in love with a fork. Like, no, you need to think about the meal. What are you trying to achieve? Like the goal is not to personalize stuff. The goal is to make it better for users, to make it more contextually relevant, to make it more useful for them to find the information they need. If you understand that, then you may use personalization as a tool and that guides your personalization efforts versus personalization as an objective. let’s, let me add the best personalization technology on my website. So that to me is that being curious, but being skeptical. So being practical and not forgetting the basics, like what’s really important for our business. and, making sure that it’s, it’s all connected behind that strategy of what is experience and the message that we want to deliver to our customers.
