Mercury Updates Systinet, Readies For HP Takeover

Mercury Interactive launched a new version of its Systinet 2 SOA governance software this week as the company held its last Mercury World user conference before its looming acquisition by Hewlett-Packard.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy and software were a focus at the show, which drew about 3,000 Mercury customers and partners to Las Vegas. Besides the new Systinet 2 release, the first that's fully integrated with Mercury's products, the company added two new products to its SOA portfolio: Mercury Service Test and Mercury Service Test Management.

"People are moving out of the Tinkertoy stage with SOA, and they're starting to deploy SOA capabilities that have tremendous value," said Christopher Lochhead, Mercury's chief marketing officer. "As they do that, something meaningfully different is required to get to the promise of SOA."

Mercury, based in Mountain View, Calif., hopes its product lineup will be that special sauce. Best known for its IT governance and application testing tools, Mercury is tapping the SOA buzz to emphasize its software's strength in governing and managing heterogeneous IT services.

The Systinet 2 update includes new customizable dashboards that give users a consolidated view of their application and business-process services, including availability and requests. New built-in reports cover SOA functionality such as service consumption, dependencies and reuse levels, and beefed-up RSS capabilities facilitate data syndication.

Mercury's other new offerings, Service Test and Service Test Management, enable users to test functionality and performance of new business services and changes, as they would with applications.

Mercury partner Merlin International, an Englewood, Colo., consultancy that specializes in government work, chose Systinet's registry software for publishing and discovering business services for several of its projects. Merlin CTO Mark Zalubas said most of the SOA customers that his company works with are large organizations requiring complex data integration.

"There are a lot of people interested in the long-term vision of where SOA is going. But in order for SOA to work, you have to have a critical mass of services, and they just don't exist yet," Zalubas said. "A lot of the benefits for SOA today are really in the future."

Systinet has been through a succession of owners. Mercury acquired it early this year for $105 million and then agreed to be bought by HP for $4.5 billion. That deal is on track to close by the end of the year.

Merlin's Zalubas said that while his company isn't an HP partner, he expects a smooth transition.

"We're tightening our relationship going forward with Mercury, and we don't have any concerns at this time about HP," Zalubas said. "We haven't blown up any bridges with HP."