Mercury Interactive has bolstered its credentials in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) market with the UK launch of a raft of integrated SOA governance, testing and management tools.

Following its acquisition of SOA governance specialist Systinet earlier this year, Mercury launched an updated version of its governance suite alongside two new SOA testing products and an upgraded version of its Business Availability Center management suite.

The company said that Systinet 2 features enhanced dashboard, user interface and reporting capabilities for tracking various services and application components within an SOA environment. However, James Stevenson, head of Mercury in the UK, Middle East and Africa, said that the most impressive aspect of the new suite was the tight integration it boasts with Mercury's other suites, including its new SOA testing toolkits.

"By integrating quality, testing and management functionality around [Systinet's] SOA governance functionality we can offer support for the entire SOA lifecycle," he said. "Most people can just do the PowerPoint slides [showing integration plans] nine months after an acquisition, but we've done the whole integration."

Mercury said the new products ensured firms can test, deploy and manage SOA's from a single point, allowing them to cut support costs and increase the speed with which they can build applications from reusable components. "The time saving on offer is enormous," said Stevenson.

He also highlighted that the tightened integration between Systinet and Mercury's Application Mapping (MAM) software would improve the reliability of SOA environments. "One of the problems with SOAs is that 'rogue services' that have not been registered and been through proper testing can get released," he explained. "MAM can track services, check them against the registry and flag them if they are not registered."