Mercury Interactive announces industry`s first business technology optimisation products

Mercury Interactive Corporation today took a significant step forward in tangibly addressing a top CIO priority to better align the performance of IT to meet business goals with the introduction of Optane, the industry`s first business technology optimisation (BTO) product suite.

Mercury Interactive`s BTO strategy is in response to the increasing pressure on IT to maximise business process quality in the face of shrinking budgets and organisational complexity. BTO applies quality management principles to IT, to dramatically improve an enterprise`s ability to continuously measure, maximise and manage the quality of IT-enabled business processes to produce business results, while reducing the overall cost of technology.

With BTO, companies can optimise the substantial technology investments made over the last three to five years, thereby lowering the cost of IT and enabling the funding of new initiatives. Unlike earlier attempts to improve business processes that became costly and time consuming, BTO can be implemented incrementally to realise a return on investment in days and weeks instead of months and years.

The Optane product suite brings together Mercury Interactive`s existing product families for enterprise testing, production tuning and performance management-- providing IT with the first end-to-end approach for measuring, maximising and managing quality across all stages of the application lifecycle. By having three product lines share the same set of metrics and reusable scripts, the Optane suite unites today`s disparate processes and disconnected organisations under an umbrella of total quality management. With Optane, IT now has a common set of metrics for predicting the behaviour of an application, from load testing in pre-production to real world performance post deployment.

"We know the difficulties facing businesses today. IT needs to proactively manage applications and infrastructures during their entire lifecycles and in alignment with lines of business," said Amnon Landan, president, CEO and chairman of Mercury Interactive. "Our business technology optimisation initiative and the Optane suite specifically provide the industry`s first solutions that enable IT to manage and continuously improve operations to deliver superior business results."

Mercury Interactive has long enjoyed a market-leading position in pre-production with its enterprise testing products LoadRunner, WinRunner, and Test Director. Over the past two years, Mercury Interactive has also become a market leader in production with its Topaz product family. In providing 24x7 solutions for production, Mercury Interactive identified a market need for a "tuning" middle level that bridges the gap between pre-production and production, and has pioneered the industry`s first tuning family of products and services, including ActiveTune and ProTune. Results from tuning, which proactively optimises the production infrastructure for specific applications, have been impressive. More than 3 000 customers have witnessed an average performance increase of 400%, most of which occurred without additional investments in hardware, software or network bandwidth. By providing the tuning missing link, Mercury Interactive is able to provide a single, cohesive product foundation and a unified process for BTO.

BTO`s next mission is to address IT-enabled business processes in the real-time enterprise. Today, Mercury Interactive takes the first step in optimising production for the real-time enterprise with the announcement of Topaz Business Availability, the industry`s first interactive digital cockpit, which surfaces vital real-time performance indicators of mission critical applications in production. Topaz Business Availability aligns IT with business executives for the first time by presenting a common view of how well IT operations are meeting line of business goals. With Topaz Business Availability, the enterprise can track operations by service levels in real-time, ensuring problems are prioritised and fixed before they can negatively impact business.

Just as Topaz Business Availability optimises application performance management, it is anticipated other solutions for optimising business infrastructure (tuning) and application readiness (testing) will follow in the future evolution of Optane as a platform. The end result will be an integrated, comprehensive set of solutions providing quality performance across the IT-enabled application lifecycle in real-time.

Mercury Interactive is filling a key business and technology need, according to a new Forrester Research study that identifies the primary IT-business alignment and integration pain-points currently facing CIOs.

Released today, Forrester`s comprehensive study of 122 senior IT executives in Global 2000 companies revealed that CIOs are struggling to meet the corporate directive to lower costs and improve process quality. Co-sponsored by Mercury Interactive, the study further reveals that CIOs are under extreme pressure to support line of business requirements and deliver value, but currently lack satisfactory tools for accomplishing these goals. According to the study, more than half of the CIOs struggle to meaningfully measure and manage today`s increasingly complex business applications.