Mercury Interactive Revamps Product Line

Under the new approach, disclosed Monday, the developer is reorganizing its software into four so-called optimization centers that include existing offerings as well as new products slated to be introduced over the next two quarters, Mercury executives said. Those four suites include the Mercury IT Governance Center, Mercury Quality Center, Mercury Performance Center and Mercury Business Availability Center. All include a realtime dashboard, as well as a set of integrated applications and a workflow engine. The executives declined to discuss pricing.

Christopher Lochhead, chief marketing officer at Sunnyvale-based Mercury, said the changes will help the company and its partners shift from selling at a departmental level to selling at the corporate level within enterprises. "Leading customers are already organizing centers in this way," he said.

"The idea is that I want to be able to drive my business without a blindfold," said Bobbi Soni, vice president and global solution leader, integration services at BearingPoint, McLean, Va., which has been using Mercury's application testing technology for the past several years.

Soni said BearingPoint's customers are looking for tools to help their align their business vision with their existing technology assets, rather than simply relying on gut instinct. "They need levers to impact the downstream operations," he said.

This is particularly true of financial services firms and the retail industry, which have been the quickest to move, Soni said.

"This is sort of like ERP for IT," he said.

Lochhead said Mercury's new suites address two fundamental questions that companies are trying to answer when it comes to IT: "Are we working on the right things?" and "Is the output of IT delivering business value?"

Mercury IT Governance Center is made up of eight applications, including Portfolio Manager, that help companies manage and align their existing IT assets.

Mercury Quality Center builds on the company's existing application testing technology--WinRunner--with the Application Delivery Dashboard and the Business Process Testing and Application Delivery Foundation modules. It also includes enhanced editions of TestDirector and QuickTest.

Mercury Performance Center is intended to help with capacity planning and has three new modules, including the aforementioned Application Delivery Dashboard and Application Delivery Foundation as well as a Capacity Planning component.

The final suite, Mecury Business Availability Center, builds on the company's Topaz line. New functionality includes a Customer Impact module that lets users prioritize service levels and maintenance requests based on their overall impact on a company's operations.

All of the new or enhanced products included in the four suites will be available by the end of the fourth quarter, Mercury executives said.