Now, NetworkBench covers about 330 cities in China and 60 more overseas. More than 100,000 netizens in China are recruited to submit online monitoring reports to the company.

Meanwhile, Pu emphasizes the company's tailored service. For discussions with clients, NetworkBench usually sends one representative from its IT department and another from its sales department. By frequently interacting with clients, NetworkBench can respond quickly to their special demands.

In November 2012, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology listed one of NetworkBench's user-experience evaluation indexes as an industry standard. The index, created by the company in 2007, monitors how long it takes to download all the contents when a web page is first visited.

"This (providing tailored service for companies) is not a waste of time, because special demands from leaders of different fields can help us to understand that part of market," says Pu. "For example, if we provide satisfactory service to Tencent, then it will be easier for us to meet demands from other social networking and instant messenger companies."

At the same time, online performance demands have been growing. According to a report from the China Internet Network Information Center, China had 538 million netizens by the end of June 2012, more than the entire population of the US. The web-browsing speed is lower than the average level of other countries and the Internet environment is far more complicated, according to ChinaCache, a leading provider of Internet content and application delivery services in China.

At the same time, more companies are starting online businesses, says Fu Liang, an independent IT analyst based in Beijing.

"Especially for e-commerce websites, a better online performance means more deals, more advertisements and more revenue. Many websites are now making more efforts to improve user experience," he says.

In the coming year, Pu says NetworkBench will set up more monitoring spots in North America and Europe and hire local teams in those areas. "We won't dispatch Chinese staff members to do overseas work."

In the glocal market, one of NetworkBench's strongest assets is its reputation among major Internet companies. It took Microsoft two years to accept NetworkBench's service, and it took IBM nearly three years. "They are impressed by what we do here, so I think we can impress more overseas clients in the future," Pu says.

But some analysts think that this niche market is still in its infancy and will take a long time to grow.

"The scale of this market depends on how much money those companies are willing to invest into such a niche service, and online performance monitoring still has a technology threshold," says Tan Yanming, senior consultant with Detecon International GmbH.

"Besides, it is not easy to apply a Chinese business model to North America, especially when Keynote and Gomez are dominating the market. But companies like NetworkBench can compete with Keynote and Gomez in markets outside North America where Chinese companies can take advantage of their labor and more creative business model."

Contact the writers at suzhou@chinadaily.com.cn and chenyingqun@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 02/01/2013 page20)