CRN Interview: Mercury Interactive's Amnon Landan

Mercury Interactive commands half of the global market for tools that test pre-production software. It's also staked a leading role in the market for application management. Now, with its June acquisition of Kintana, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company is making a grab for a bigger share of the post-production space. Chairman, President and CEO Amnon Landan spoke with West Coast Bureau Chief Rochelle Garner about Mercury's changing focus and the role of the channel.

CRN: Why did you acquire Kintana, which seems so different from the systems management/testing and application management software you already offer?

LANDAN: Look at what you get when you add all three together. The No. 1 issue today is aligning IT to produce business value. The first component of that is, what are the things IT is working on? Are they the right things? And are they working on them the right way? That's Kintana. Then there's the application of technology to business processes. In the preproduction stage, it's [a question of whether] the technologies [will] do what they're supposed to. During post-production, the question is, are they managed correctly to give that business value?

CRN: Is there really that much of a need for what you offer?

LANDAN: It's almost at the point today where IT can't keep the lights on and deliver the capabilities their business needs. Bank of America makes 30,000 changes to its IT infrastructure a day. The question is not whether IT can do it cheaper; it's whether IT can do it at all. I've seen a lot of cases where people are on the edge. If they don't get their houses in order, the business will fall off a cliff.

CRN: Do you have serious channel plans beyond using big systems integrators?

LANDAN: We sell direct [and through] systems integrators and solution providers. Right now, our channel is 30-70, with 30 [percent] made up of [systems integrators] and solution providers, and 70 [percent] direct. I'd like to see that become 50-50. Our indirect channel will become more important as we sell solutions and not tools, because service becomes more instrumental in reaching customers.

CRN: Is there a particular kind of partner that's a good fit for Mercury?

LANDAN: We're seeing interest from potential partners who come from legacy management, such as BMC. With the shift in spending away from systems management, we're the right horse for the future. We think business technology optimization is as big,if not bigger than,the big waves that have come through in enterprise software.

CRN: Any companies or technologies you're considering for future acquisitions?

LANDAN: It's very difficult to answer this question. Our technology blueprint is 'build, buy and partner.' If you look at IT governance, testing, and application management and delivery, whatever fits in those categories falls into that possibility [of being acquired]. Over time, it's important to maintain those three engines and get to where our stuff is OEMed by hardware and software vendors, but I'm not there yet.

CRN: What is Mercury's role in utility computing?

LANDAN: We have no role in utility computing. Two big things are happening in IT, and they touch on different scales. One is how to provision computing resources on demand, and that's not part of our business. The other is the business value of IT. That's our business. We help with the framework and the architecture, not whether IT needs to buy more capacity from IBM.