Mercury Interactive Will Acquire Systinet

Mercury Interactive is acquiring privately held Systinet, an SOA governance and life-cycle management software and services provider, for $105 million in cash. The deal--an attempt to secure a portion of the burgeoning SOA market--is subject to the customary closing conditions and certain regulatory approvals, and is expected to close this quarter. Mercury intends to leverage Systinet's products to help lower the risks associated with SOA initiatives, according to the company. Systinet's portfolio includes Systinet Registry, a business service registry for organizing, managing, discovering, and publishing reusable business services and other SOA assets; and Systinet Policy Manager, which streamlines policy creation and management and automates service validation, ensuring only conforming services are published into production. The combination of Mercury's business technology optimization approach and Systinet's SOA capabilities will make it easier for the two firms' customers to manage SOA business services and to optimize the quality, performance, and availability of SOA application, said Tony Zingale, president and CEO of Mercury Interactive, during a conference call Monday. "We believe that this acquisition positions Mercury as the vendor of choice as they seek to reduce the risks of SOA while gaining real business value." SOA, which essentially allows organizations to break applications into small, configurable, and reusable elements, is a hot-button issue in the industry. "As the market shifts from first-generation J2EE applications to second-generation SOA applications, the requirements for designing, delivering, and managing applications [are] meaningfully different," said David Murphy, CFO of Mercury Interactive, during the call. "For SOA initiatives to succeed, you must ensure that the SOA components work the right way together at the right time to produce the right business outcome. This transaction positions Mercury to become a key foundational underpinning of SOA." The acquisition is a positive move for Mercury and its customers, mainly because to address SOA, the use of a registry and the detailed requirements for metadata to be organized and accessed within the infrastructure is extremely important, says Sandra Rogers, director of SOA, Web services, and integration at IDC. "This is a critical technology for most large organizations that have or plan to have extensive SOA environments," she says. "It gives them running room to exploit this technology and integrate it into other products, because the value of this technology is how well it is integrated in with both design-time tools and deployment infrastructure. The direction that Systinet was going was certainly in the life cycle and governance areas for services which will bump up with incumbent players like Mercury eventually." Rogers notes, though, that organizations need to be wary of creating silos of information throughout the enterprise. "There is [data] that is stored in so many places in the technology environment, so creating a centralized location is not necessarily what people are envisioning can conceivably happen in a large enterprise," she says. "The potential of redundancy and the potential for conflicts regarding the information are very important. Storing it is one thing but creating the processes around it is another, and that's where we're going to see innovation coming from multiple vendors." Related articles: What Is SOA? The basics behind service-oriented architecture. SOA Continues to Pick Up Steam Where's the SOA Train Headed?