Mercury Releases Portfolio Management 5.5

Dubbed Mercury Portfolio Management 5.5, the product addresses strategic components of the IT governance process, helping customers take control of IT execution and best practices as they try to align technology with the needs of their businesses. According to Sue Barsamian, vice president of strategic marketing at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Mercury, the product also helps companies automate workflow by embedding rules-based business processing.

"CIOs are getting more serious about running IT like a business, but what they run into headfirst is that there is no management system for IT in place to help them," Barsamian said. "Now, with [Portfolio Management 5.5], there is."

The new product enables customers to adopt an enterprise approach to managing the portfolio life cycle by handling everything from proposal initiation to project execution and benefit management, Barsamian said. Decision-makers also can view the network portfolio by expense, resources or benefit to the enterprise as a whole.

New features in Mercury Portfolio Management 5.5 include enhanced project scorecards, unlimited qualitative and quantitative "what-if" project scenarios, out-of-the-box best practices, new user-interface configuration options, and enhanced dashboards to enable metrics. Such functionality can improve a company's IT governance policy tenfold, said Alex Lobba, Mercury's vice president of product management and IT Governance.

"We've figured out the critical metrics that people actually want to score," Lobba said. "For companies concerned with governance, this is the stuff we know we need to focus on."

For customers that need portfolio management within days, Mercury this week also released the Mercury Enterprise Fast Start Program for Portfolio Management 5.5. The product gives customers a fully functioning portfolio view of their top projects in as little as two weeks, Barsamian said.

Both products are now available to channel partners.