Rich Howard

Rich Howard Email and Phone Number

Founder and CEO @ Optimal
Atlanta, GA, US
Rich Howard's Location
Atlanta, Georgia, United States, United States
Rich Howard's Contact Details
About Rich Howard

For many Fortune 500 companies, a major obstacle in achieving their revenue goals is the performance (speed) of their digital touchpoints. Tens and even hundreds of millions of increased revenue can result from optimizing the speed on their websites and mobile apps. When considering your Web strategy, here are some aspects to consider: 1. Consumers expect sites to load in two seconds or less. This is especially so for users of mobile, which has its own optimization challenges. Visitors abandon slow sites at three seconds.2. Measuring and optimizing your performance vs other competitors is more important than ever, as Google is switching to using Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor for SEO. 3. Cost of Black Friday outages not only mean tens of millions in lost sales, it can damage your brand’s reputation as well. It's critical that your site is load tested and ready for your peak events. Even with migrations to the cloud, there is still a strong need to ensure that your site can scale to a rapidly increasing volume of traffic and that you have the right monitoring and plans in place should anything happen.4. Content Delivery Network (CDN) optimization means decreased IT spend, improved customer experience and scalability, and resilience.5. Thinking about doing business in China, Russia or the Middle East? You need some very specific strategies to build a compelling and optimized experience. (See my Featured section for details.)Enterprise CTOs, CIOs, VPs of Architecture, VPs of Engineering, and others also know that a site’s performance is a ranking factor for SEO, and is tied strongly to conversion and customer satisfaction.At Optimal, we help enterprises in Fortune 500 eCommerce Retail, Technology, Telecoms, Energy, Events Organizations, and Travel realize the full benefits from fully optimized websites and mobile apps. We provide consulting, training, and support in Web Performance Optimization (WPO), Mobile App Performance Optimization, Load Testing, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and more.

Rich Howard's Current Company Details
Optimal

Optimal

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Founder and CEO
Atlanta, GA, US
Rich Howard Work Experience Details
  • Optimal
    Founder And Ceo
    Optimal
    Atlanta, Ga, Us
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  • Optimal
    Founder / Ceo
    Optimal Sep 2015 - Present
    San Francisco, Ca, Us
    Optimal is dedicated to optimizing enterprise websites and mobile apps to increase performance, conversion rate and customer satisfaction. We leverage multiple data sources to generate optimization insights and help manage the delivery of changes, resulting in an improved user experience. Our team provide consulting, training and support in the following areas:● Web Performance Optimization (WPO) to improve page load times. RUM, Synthetic, APM and Load Testing. Full stack (frontend, backend, database, infrastructure, content, 3rd party / tag management)● Mobile App Performance Optimization to improve app performance.● Content Delivery Network (CDN) / EdgeOps setup and tuning.● Automation and CI/CD pipeline tooling for performance● Seasonal Readiness assessments, to ensure companies have successful peak events (e.g. Black Friday and Cyber Week).We work with a range of tools, including:Customer Experience: Akamai (SOASTA) mPulse, Rigor, Quantum Metric, WebPageTest, Google Lighthouse, Speedcurve, Sitespeed.io, CatchpointApplication Performance: AppDynamics, New Relic, DynatraceLoad: Akamai CloudTest, Jmeter / Blazemeter, LoadImpactCDN: Akamai, Fastly, CloudFlare, Amazon CloudFront, ChinaCache
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  • Optimal
    Web Performance Optimization
    Optimal Sep 2015 - Present
    San Francisco, Ca, Us
    Two seconds. That’s all you have for a page to load. Any longer and 40% of visitors will abandon your site. Game over. Sluggish load times, freezing, crashing—they all interrupt your user experience, derail conversions, and devalue your brand. Moreover, frustrated shoppers avoid returning to sites with poor performance. You may as well hand your competitors sales on a platter. But as pages grow in size and complexity, how do you deliver a rich, engaging experience at speed? Harness web performance optimization to drive sales and trawl for issues and ways to fix them.
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  • Optimal
    Web Performance Management
    Optimal Sep 2015 - Present
    San Francisco, Ca, Us
    Only 1% of e-commerce customers say websites meet their expectations every time. If slow load times or failing functionality are driving customers away, you need to know about it. Since multiple factors influence performance, rooting out issues can be a puzzle. That’s why we cherry-pick from a range of vendors to find the right mix of best-in-class measurement and optimization tools. We also use our depth of knowledge to create winning strategies to crush your performance goals. The result? A speedy site, happy, engaged customers, and a rapid uptick in conversions.
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  • Optimal
    Load & Capacity Testing
    Optimal Sep 2015 - Present
    San Francisco, Ca, Us
    Imagine your website as a wooden bridge with a low weight allowance. If a heavily loaded truck attempts to cross, there’s a high chance the bridge will collapse. Similarly, as traffic flow to your website grows, it places additional strain on software and infrastructure. Testing for stress fractures is by far the best way to avoid a full-blown crisis. Load and capacity testing measures how your site performs under everyday loads and extreme pressure to uncover the cracks that could lead to a breakdown.
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  • Optimal
    Web Performance Reporting Services
    Optimal Sep 2015 - Present
    San Francisco, Ca, Us
    You can’t fly a plane without an altimeter. Similarly, if you want to know how your website really performs, you need to measure it. From Real User Monitoring (RUM) to uptime reports, we pull together multiple data sources to give you end-to-end visibility of what’s working, what’s not, and where you should focus for optimal results. And to help you make sense of all that lovely data, we set up key reporting—like competitor benchmarking and health check reports—to quickly cut through the noise and get to what’s most important for your business.
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  • Optimal
    Peak Planning
    Optimal Sep 2015 - Present
    San Francisco, Ca, Us
    Be prepared. A little planning goes a long way when you want to avoid a nightmare scenario—like your website crashing during your busiest sales event. Using load testing to understand traffic and identify stress fractures in your system or weeding out bottlenecks with a pre-peak audit gives you added confidence when you’re facing unprecedented spikes in activity.
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  • Optimal
    Cdn Consulting
    Optimal Sep 2015 - Present
    San Francisco, Ca, Us
    Content delivery networks (CDN)—a distributed web of servers delivering content locally rather than remotely—serve 50% of content consumed over the internet. Whether it’s movies, software, games, or images, reducing the distance between servers and users means content renders in a flash, dramatically improving user experience. With the increased complexity of website development combined with a higher expectation from the end-user, companies have to be smarter about how they scale websites. Our CDN consulting helps identify opportunities to improve latency issues, enhance scalability and build additional resiliency.Our CDN consulting services give you the lowdown on static and dynamic content caching, load balancing, content protection, and more, and help you build a strategy to tackle challenges. Together, we’ll cover everything from Akamai and Fastly to Cloudfront and Cloudflare.
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  • Sephora
    Senior Architect
    Sephora May 2017 - Nov 2018
    Neuilly Sur Seine, Ile De France, Fr
    Senior architect, reporting to the VP of eCommerce.I worked on several areas related to frontend and edge delivery performance, including: Akamai content delivery network (CDN), Frontend code optimizations, cache tuning, APM, Technical SEO, digital analytics, vendor selection and management, IT governance and web performance roadmap.
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  • Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
    Principal Performance Engineer
    Williams-Sonoma, Inc. Mar 2016 - Feb 2017
    San Francisco, Ca, Us
    Principal Engineer, reporting to the VP of Architecture.Akamai CDN (content delivery network), SOASTA mPulse, CloudTest, AppDynamics, Tealium, Adobe Analytics, SearchMetrics.
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  • The Hartford
    Senior Architect (Tag Management And Digital Analytics)
    The Hartford Dec 2015 - Mar 2016
    Hartford, Ct, Us
    Lead architect on a project to roll out a unified data layer (Tealium) and Google Analytics setup across multiple online properties.
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  • Vodafone
    Architect, Global Channels Optimisation (Vodafone Group)
    Vodafone Sep 2012 - Sep 2015
    London, Gb
    I provided overall technical governance on a programme focussed on improving customer experience across the following areas: Web Performance Optimisation (Keynote, SOASTA, Content Delivery Networks)Mobile App Performance Optimisation (Keynote) Search Engine OptimisationWeb Analytics (inc Adobe Analytics, Clarabridge, Qualtrics) Mobile App Analytics (Adobe)Tag Management (Tealium)Personalisation (Adobe Target)My work at Group covered all 21 international Vodafone markets (434 million worldwide customers), websites and mobile eCare apps (iOS, Android, Windows Phone). I wrote and maintained technical guidelines and best practice covering these areas, wrote non-functional requirements, performed vendor evaluations, provided architectural services to Group commercial stakeholders and contributed to Group decision making. For the local markets I provided individual technical consultancy to developers, architects, analytics experts and vendors. I also provided technical consultancy for Group central projects, reviewed all solution design documents and represented the team at the Channels Design Authority.
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  • Flow Labs
    Technical Consultant
    Flow Labs Sep 2003 - Jun 2014
    I provided a range of web development, SEO and technical consulting services to both digital agencies and individual clients. Clients that I worked with included:OrangeVodafoneBooker Prize for FictionInternational Prize for Arabic FictionNational TrustVictorinoxBFI London Film FestivalJK RowlingUNICEF
  • Lexisnexis
    Web Developer
    Lexisnexis Jun 2002 - Aug 2003
    New York City, Ny, Us
    Working as part of a User Interface design team, I played a critical role in the development of a new multi-language platform for collating news and legal information. Day to day, I was involved in building multilingual (English, French and German) usability study interface prototypes, and also helped systems engineers construct production ready frontend code that worked across multiple browsers and met good coding and accessibility guidelines. In addition, I acted as a liaison between the software engineering team in the US and the usability team in the UK.Skills used: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ASP, UX testing, UI Prototypes
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  • City College Brighton And Hove
    Lecturer, Multimedia
    City College Brighton And Hove Sep 2001 - Jun 2002
    Brighton, East Sussex, Gb
    I taught three modules from the BTEC Multimedia syllabus (Web Design, Multimedia Technology and Introduction to Programming) and achieved a high rating for my teaching skills despite having no formal teaching qualifications.
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  • Dvisions Ltd
    Head Of Technology
    Dvisions Ltd Oct 1999 - Jun 2000
    Melbury Osmond, Dorset, Gb
    I oversaw several technology led projects for this internet marketing company, and was responsible for development of the company website, staff IT training, technical integration of pay per click and affiliate programs and internet marketing research including search engine optimization (SEO) work.
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Rich Howard Skills

Seo Mobile Applications Javascript Jquery Php Web Applications Web Analytics Software Development Xhtml Accessibility Web Performance Agile Methodologies Css User Centered Design Google Analytics Information Architecture Web Content Management Json Html 5 Enterprise Architecture Html5 Apache Mysql Solution Architecture Cms Search Engine Optimization Performance Tuning Http Mvc Git Usability Testing Ajax Java Akamai Php Frameworks Adobe Marketing Cloud Tealium Adobe Analytics Coding Standards Cascading Style Sheets Togaf Content Delivery Networks Web Caching Adobe Target User Acceptance Testing Tag Management Objective C

Rich Howard Education Details

  • University Of Sussex
    University Of Sussex
    Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence

Frequently Asked Questions about Rich Howard

What company does Rich Howard work for?

Rich Howard works for Optimal

What is Rich Howard's role at the current company?

Rich Howard's current role is Founder and CEO.

What is Rich Howard's email address?

Rich Howard's email address is ho****@****mal.com

What schools did Rich Howard attend?

Rich Howard attended University Of Sussex.

What are some of Rich Howard's interests?

Rich Howard has interest in Psychology, Thai Language, Personal Finance, Bonsai, Investing, Haiku, Travelling, Macro Photography, Taoism, Orchestral Music.

What skills is Rich Howard known for?

Rich Howard has skills like Seo, Mobile Applications, Javascript, Jquery, Php, Web Applications, Web Analytics, Software Development, Xhtml, Accessibility, Web Performance, Agile Methodologies.

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