Mercury Rounds Out App Management Capabilities

Once known only for its testing tools, Mercury now or soon will offer software in three broad categories of application delivery, application management and IT governance that, together, help the data center align equipment, people and projects to corporate goals.

Part of Mercury's application management business, the new Resolution Center complements the company's Business Availability Center, introduced in October. Both suites focus on production-level applications and both share a common foundation -- although one suite is not needed to use the other. BAC helps IT organizations allocate and adjust server resources for optimal availability and performance of both in-house and packaged applications. The new Resolution Center enables lower-level support folks to identify, isolate and prioritize problems that need fixing. Resolution Center additionally can place IT problems in a business context -- showing, for example, that a failed router has stymied $250,000 worth of claims from being processed.

"The router being down may mean you aren't processing X megs a second, but that doesn't carry the same weight as saying this number of orders aren't being completed and here's the impact on your business," said Mike Courtney, a managing director of Bearing Point's quality management and testing solutions practice, in Dallas.

Resolution Center comprises five applications designed to keep the data center on a smooth course. Its Incident Resolution package, for example, can convert tier-three expertise into automated "runbooks," or scripts, for use by tier-one personnel. Problem Isolation allows tier two support staff to run deep-level diagnostics and ad hoc tests to pinpoint more complex problems. Application Diagnostics dives even deeper into the inner workings of a failed program, tracing a transaction through j2EE layers, components and methods -- down to specific lines of code. The other applications -- Application Management Analytics and Application Management Dashboard -- help put operations in a business perspective.

"Our approach is three-fold," said Mukund Mohan, a senior product marketing manager of the Sunnyvale, Calif., company. "First, we can prevent the problem by sending alerts, and giving diagnostic information, as the application starts to deteriorate. Second, we automate all of the steps people would go through to solve a problem, enabling more issues to be solved by less-expensive staff." And of course, the third approach is the resolution itself, thanks to the deep diagnostics.

"I do think [Resolution Center] will round out Mercury's ability to support the full quality lifecycle," said Courtney. "Just because something goes into production doesn't mean you're done managing the quality of the software. The business and resolution centers, combined with Mercury's software for the pre-production phase, will help round that out."

While Mercury is the only company to go after what it calls "business technology optimization," it has more than its share of competitors -- especially in the application management arena. These include IBM Tivoli, BMC Software and Hewlett-Packard.

But Mercury's overarching notion of BTO addresses every stage of the IT environment, from vetting code as it's being written to managing all aspects of applications that are in production. Later this year the company is expected to add the third level to its BTO framework: software to help IT operations govern themselves. That software, the result of Mercury's August acquisition of Kintana, is expected to help IT managers make better sense of acquiring products, managing projects and overseeing finances.

In effect, Mercury is promoting an overall vision of helping data centers manage, identify and measure their contribution and value to the corporation. That's the same message being sounded by the likes of IBM Software and Veritas. Those companies just give it a different moniker, such as business performance management.