Mercury Interactive expands support for SAP solutions 21 June 2001

Mercury Interactive, the leading provider of enterprise testing and performance management solutions, has expanded its support for SAP solutions to include testing and application performance management for mySAP.com.

With customised versions of QuickTest Professional, LoadRunner and Topaz, Mercury Interactive customers can now test and monitor the performance of their R/3 and mySAP.com implementations to ensure a smooth roll-out and deliver a consistently positive user experience, says Graeme Allcock, sales director for Mercury Interactive in South Africa.

"As SAP implementations go live, corporate IT departments need to verify the functionality and scalability of business processes across the enterprise and maintain that performance 24x7," he continues.

"Mercury Interactive`s open and integrated enterprise testing and performance management solutions allow customers to not only test the business processes within SAP solutions, but verify integration with other enterprise and e-business applications. The added ability to correlate performance issues with end-user experience helps customers speed time to problem resolution and reduce overall IT costs."

Mercury Interactive`s testing tools are already in use at hundreds of SAP customer sites, including Eastman Chemical Company, site of one of the largest implementations of SAP R/3 4.6b. (For more information please view a complete case study).

QuickTest Professional, Mercury Interactive`s functional and regression testing tool, built specifically for Web-based e-business platforms such as mySAP.com, offers a fast, easy way to verify that SAP solutions will work as expected once deployed. QuickTest simplifies and accelerates test creation by capturing business processes based on user interactions with the application.

With its enabling technology, ActiveScreen, QuickTest Professional replaces traditional test scripts with graphical icons and screen capture. This icon-based testing approach bridges the gap between testers and business analysts by allowing users with limited technical knowledge to create robust data-driven tests with no learning curve.

In addition, the functional test scripts recorded in QuickTest Professional can be easily replayed in a customised version of LoadRunner, the industry-standard load-testing tool, to predict the behaviour and performance of SAP solutions under a real-life user load.

LoadRunner exercises the application by emulating the traffic of real users. Each of these users drives the application with real transactions while LoadRunner measures response times, network delays and both server and application performance.

To help isolate performance bottlenecks and fine-tune performance within the application infrastructure, LoadRunner provides a customised integrated real-time monitor that captures and displays performance data from within the application server during the load test. These capabilities enable customers to minimise test cycles, optimise performance and reduce overall IT costs.

"Once an SAP solution is rolled out on the production system, customers are able to once again leverage their existing test scripts with Topaz, Mercury Interactive`s performance management tool, to monitor the performance of the application, receive alerts when issues arise, identify problems and diagnose their cause," Allcock explains.

"Whether customers are using the SAP graphical user interface for HTML or Windows client, Topaz provides a customised application infrastructure monitor that allows customers to identify and resolve problems within the application server. It is the only solution that measures the end-user experience 24x7 and correlates performance issues to their root cause in the application infrastructure - inside and outside the firewall and in the application. As a result, organisations can ensure users are receiving solid performance and quickly resolve any infrastructure problems."