Mercury offers business technology optimisation blueprint

Mercury has stepped into the gap that opened when companies restrategised IT policies to ensure alignment with business objectives. The emphasis, globally, is now on ensuring that value is gained from IT investments, with better performing applications, lower costs and lower risk. Enter Business Technology Optimisation (BTO). This Mercury offering focuses on optimising three critical IT functions - IT governance, application delivery and application management.

"While BTO has taken off worldwide, SA is still on a learning curve," says Magda Engelbrecht of Mercury South Africa. "Our BTO offering is consolidated and proven, however, in SA optimisation is still disparate and not seen as a cohesive solution. This needs to be addressed if businesses are to gain maximum value."

Mercury offers a three-pronged approach to BTO. "The IT governance offering assists CIOs in managing all the major processes required to operate a large IT organisation. In the application delivery area, we provide a suite of software products and services that help to test and tune application quality and performance in both pre-deployment and production stages. The application management offering assists customers in managing performance and availability of their applications 24x7, once the application is in production as well as by responding to problems quickly and proactively," explains Engelbrecht.

The three IT functions have been distilled into five functional optimisation centres, designed to align disparate IT functions by consolidating and centralising software, services and best practices. "The Mercury Optimisation Centres consist of integrated software, services and best practices acquired by working with 30 000 customers worldwide," says Engelbrecht. These centres are the IT Governance Centre, Quality Centre (application delivery), Performance Centre (application delivery), Business Availability Centre (application management) and Resolution Centre (application management).

"Consolidation needs to be scalable if BTO is to be effective. Organisations, while striving towards IT governance and IT deliverables, find themselves at different stages and this needs to be addressed with an incremental approach when implementing the optimisation centre model," says Engelbrecht.

"The solutions are easily integrated to support business` most mission-critical IT environments," explains Engelbrecht. "Packaged offerings exist for SAP solutions, Oracle Ebusiness Suite, Siebel eBusiness Applications, PeopleSoft Enterprise and J2EE." International BTO partners provide the required support where needed. These include global software vendors (as mentioned in the packaged offerings), global system integrators (Accenture, IBM, BearingPoint, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Deloitte Consulting, and EDS), technology alliances (Microsoft, SAP, Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, IBM, HP, Sun, Citrix, BEA) and about 200+ solution partners.

However, applications do not stand alone. Mercury has recognised, as have other companies, that a service offering is necessary to ensure accelerated value. "Mercury has developed best practices for implementing and operating the centres. First is ensuring the proper set-up, then a transfer of knowledge through staff training and assistance with organisational design, and then, most importantly, implementing the processes required to achieve world-class utilisation of the centres," says Engelbrecht.

"We are not selling random solutions. To come to market, these specific offerings have tried and tested results," says Engelbrecht. "Mercury has accumulated extensive customer information results. On average, by simple tuning a customer`s existing infrastructure there has been a four x gain in system performance without additional infrastructure. A Gartner report states that, on average, 50% of IT projects are delivered over budget, Mercury customers show a reduction of 60% on these figures."

There is no dispute that businesses desire maximum value from IT investments and a better alignment between IT and business. "Mercury has tested products and best practices to assure these objectives," concludes Engelbrecht.