Mercury Interactive Corp. earlier this week filled in more routes on its business technology optimization road map when it announced a reporting and analytics technology acquisition and a $15 million licensing deal with Motive for its ecosystem blueprinting platform.
The load testing and monitoring company acquired technology assets from Allerez Corp., which makes online analytical processing tools. Mercury Interactive will use the development tools to extend the customized reporting in its business activity management application, which uses dashboards to show CIOs how production applications are performing.
“Well use it to do a lot more flexible reporting, incorporate data from other data sets and do a lot more analysis,” said Christopher Lochhead, chief marketing officer at the Sunnyvale, Calif., company.
The Allerez technology will allow the Business Activity Manager to pull in data from a variety of sources, including legacy systems management tools from IBMs Tivoli unit, Hewlett-Packard Co.s OpenView, BMC Software Inc. and Computer Associates International Inc.
With the integrated and consolidated data from multiple sources, the Business Activity Manager will serve as “the uber cockpit for the CIO managing from the business perspective the way applications are performing,” said Lochhead.
Mercury Interactive, which paid $1.254 million in cash for the Allerez technology, named Allerez founder Jed Putterman as engineering director. Ten engineers from the San Mateo, Calif., firm will also join Mercury Interactive.
In licensing Motives ecosystem blueprinting development platform, Mercury Interactive plans to add real-time proactive problem resolution functionality to its application management products.
The technology performs just-in-time business services modeling, including the specific configuration data necessary to manage the services effectively. Configuration data can include specific elements, management parameters for those elements and the dependencies of the elements.
“With it you take a snapshot of the performance the application is intended to have. When it isnt performing at that level, it restores it to that prior level. When we have Motive functionality built-in, well be able to manage the applications so we identify a problem before it causes [a desired business performance threshold to be breached] and restore the application to a prior functioning level—and do that before it impacts customers and revenue,” Lochhead said.
Mercury Interactive intends to announce next-generation versions of its Topaz application management suite later this year with the new functionality.
