BEA Systems Inc. and Mercury Interactive Corp. on Thursday announced that they have inked a partnership that calls for BEA to bundle Mercurys diagnostic tools with the latest releases of BEAs WebLogic Web application server and JRockit Java virtual machine.
The aim of the alliance is to give developers and QA testers a leg up on finding and fixing application performance problems and detecting memory leaks before applications go into production.
The exclusive deal to bundle Mercurys Diagnostics Profiler with WebLogic and JRockit gives developers “a way to the bring performance assurance process further up in the [application] lifecycle to accelerate deployment,” said Jonathan Rende, vice president of products at Mercury in Mountain View. Calif.
“The second thing it does is make sure that when problems are found, the application support teams are quick to respond and are working with the same information as the developers who have to find and fix it,” he added.
The Profiler, which performs data collection, is free in the bundle. The full Mercury Diagnostics offering must be bought separately.
Under the terms of the deal, the two software providers are cross-licensing each others offerings so that Mercury can also distribute Beas JRockit Mission Control diagnostic toolset to Mercury Diagnostics users.
BEA also has access to Mercurys Application Management and Application Delivery product for its own use in support and proof of concepts.
“Were both distributing these things together because you never know when a customer will upgrade one of the others products. We want to make sure were consistent and get these diagnostics to the customer as soon as possible,” Rende said.
As a part of the alliance, both vendors invested in research and development, and they will co-fund marketing initiatives around the bundled offering.
Rende believes BEA chose to work with Mercury because it is the “800-pound gorilla” in the testing space and because Mercury is one of the few platform-agnostic vendors.
Both vendors also have a history of joint work together. BEA uses Mercurys load and functional testing software internally, and the two companies teamed up to create WebLogic-specific monitors for Mercurys Optane software suite.
The Mercury Diagnostics Profiler is available now with BEAs WebLogic Server 9.0 and with JRockit JVM downloads for free.
Mercury will make BEAs Mission Control Suite available as part of its Mercury Diagnostics in the first quarter of next year.