Software testing and IT governance software vendor Mercury continued its acquisition push yesterday, announcing it had paid $18.5 million to acquire ITIL-based service desk software suite VSI PowerHelp from IT service management (ITSM) specialists Vertical Solutions and Tefensoft.

Under the terms of the deal, Mercury has acquired Israel-based service desk software specialist TefenSoft as well as service desk technology and research and development resources from ITSM software provider Vertical Solutions.

"Vertical resold Tefensoft's product and added some functionality to it," explained Christopher Lochhead, chief marketing officer at Mercury. "So what we have done is acquire the whole service desk product."

Mercury said the product provides incident management, problem resolution, configuration management, change management, and asset and inventory management that automate ITIL best practices for running an IT service desk.

Melind Govekar of analyst Gartner welcomed the move, saying it would beef up Mercury's credentials as a provider of ITSM products. "It shows how serious Mercury is about moving beyond the application testing market," he said. "It has been talking about ITSM for a long time, but didn’t have a full service desk offering for handling incident and problem resolution, so its [claims were] losing a bit of credibility – that has been solved."

However, Govekar added that Mercury will need to demonstrate tight integration between its new service desk product and existing application management and change management products if it is to prove successful in the market. "The service desk market is pretty saturated and this deal takes it into competition with established players like BMC and HP," he said. "So it will need to prove it can integrate the tools with its application lifecycle management products."

Mercury predicted integration would not be a problem as it has previously worked as a reseller of VSI PowerHelp. "Our IT governance products for managing IT changes and availability will fit tightly with the service desk capabilities to help firms automatically prioritise what to act on," said Robin Purohit, vice president for application management products at Mercury.

Lochhead said this integration would help firms cope with the changing nature of service desk work, whereby administrators have to go beyond resolving problems and proactively prevent any problems.

Separately, Mercury is expected to soon bring an end to the financial uncertainty that has surrounded the company since a stock-option scandal and failure to restate its figures led to it being delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange at the start of this year. The company plans to restate the required financial results by the end of June, which will allow it to move back into regular filing cycles. Once this is achieved it will then be in a position to begin the process of relisting on one of the main stock exchanges.