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Mercury Interactive Corp. plans to debut this week a broad set of integrated application testing, change and performance management software that straddles the development and operations sides of IT.
The Mercury BTO Enterprise suite, to be unveiled at the companys user conference in Las Vegas, represents Mercurys biggest product development investment ever. The suite integrates new and existing products and adds automation features.
“Users want [IT systems] up and running, period. They dont want to know details, but they do want to know what return they get on their money,” said Steve Wrenn, senior director of IT service management at Liberty Mutual Insurance Co., in Portsmouth, N.H., who is beta testing a tool in the suite. “These tools allow me to almost prove the value of IT.”
The suite, made up of six components, includes two new tools. The Mercury Application Change Lifecycle tool is designed to manage application changes from change request to deployment to reduce the risk of outages caused by changes. It automates the process from change requests, to assessment of change impact, through testing and deployment; the tool also monitors the resulting change on a production system.
The other new offering, Mercury Application Performance Lifecycle, bridges the gap between predeployment load testing and quality assurance testing with the Mercury Business Availability Center. It allows test scripts developed in the testing lab to be stored and then reused once a change or new application goes into production. It also captures how users are working with new applications or changes, said officials.
Mercury also enhanced its Mercury IT Governance Center with a new Web services interface and Mercury Quality Center 8.2 with a dashboard that has 25 new Key Performance Indicators. The updated Mercury Performance Center 8.1 also includes a dashboard that can improve visibility into application readiness. The updated Mercury Business Availability Center 6.0 can automatically detect unscheduled changes and link those changes to any potential impact.
The new and enhanced offerings are due between now and the end of the year.