Mercury surprises critics with SOA acquisition

Troubled testing and compliance firm Mercury is set to buy governance specialist Systinet

Business technology optimisation software vendor Mercury Interactive is poised to beef up its credentials in the service oriented architecture (SOA) market after agreeing to acquire SOA governance specialist Systinet.

Experts welcomed the deal, which is expected to close during the first quarter, claiming it will not only extend Mercury's ability to manage complex SOA environments, but also reassure customers that the firm remains committed to expanding its portfolio, following the accountancy scandal that saw it delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange earlier this month.

Systinet's technology is based on a registry listing the various application components within an SOA environment that firms can use to build flexible business services. A policy manager helps customers ensure only conforming services are authorised for production, according to Systinet.

Christopher Lochhead of Mercury said this technology "chaos-proofs" SOA environments and gives IT managers enhanced control over complex SOA projects. "Up until now controlling SOA environments has proved harder than establishing democracy in Afghanistan," he said.

"SOAs give you faster time to market and better interoperability, but because changes to one component can impact a large number of services you also get more chaos," Lochhead added. "Systinet's technology provides a system of record for SOAs: it lets you know what components are out there, what they are doing, what other components they can work with and what would be the impact of any changes. "

Tony Baer of analyst firm Datamonitor welcomed the move, claiming that as more firms move from pilot SOA projects to full deployments there will be growing demand for tools that can manage large numbers of services operating across enterprise-wide SOA environments.

Systinet's technology also represents a good fit with Mercury's existing governance and testing tools for application pre-production, according to Milind Govekar of analyst Gartner.

Govekar added that the deal signalled to customers that it was "business as usual" at Mercury despite the recent financial scandal that led to the resignation of two top executives and the company's stock-market delisting. However, he warned that the new management team still has to restate results affected by the fraud as a matter of urgency if "it is to put customers' minds completely at rest".