Mercury Interactive Corporation, the global leader in business technology optimisation (BTO) software, represented in Sub-Saharan Africa by master distributor Mercury Africa, a division of the EOH Group of Companies, one of South Africa`s largest consulting, technology and outsourcing companies, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Systinet Corporation, a privately held company, for $105 million in cash.
Systinet is a leading provider of service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance and lifecycle management software and services. Customers use Systinet technology to manage SOA business services and to build secure and reliable Web services. Systinet technology, when combined with Mercury BTO Enterprise offerings, will help enable customers to take a lifecycle approach to optimising the quality, performance and availability of SOA business services.
"We believe the combination of Mercury and Systinet will immediately position us as a leader in the high-growth SOA market," said Johan Cloete, managing director, Mercury Africa. "Mercury continues to grow our BTO offerings to help customers optimise the business outcomes of their IT initiatives. Systinet`s technology and deep expertise in SOA combined with Mercury`s strong BTO market leadership introduces powerful product synergies and the ability to address a broader set of customer opportunities in the fast growing SOA market."
Systinet SOA products provide a "system of record" and a set of governance and lifecycle capabilities that help provide the visibility, control, quality and integrity critical to SOA success. Systinet products deliver capabilities for publishing and discovering business services; creating, managing and enforcing policies; and managing the full lifecycle of business services and other SOA assets.
Key Systinet products include:
* Systinet Registry, which is a widely adopted business service registry for organising, managing, discovering and publishing reusable business services and other SOA assets.
* Systinet Policy Manager, which streamlines policy creation and management and automates service validation to help ensure only conforming services are published into production.
"We are very excited to join with Mercury to accelerate our ability to help customers optimise the business outcomes of their SOA initiatives," said Thomas Erickson, president and chief executive officer of Systinet. "The combination of Systinet SOA solutions and Mercury BTO Enterprise will provide Mercury customers with a more comprehensive approach to achieving reliable and predictable business outcomes from SOA initiatives."
Mercury plans to leverage Systinet products to help customers mitigate the risk to business outcomes of SOA initiatives. Customers will be able to use Mercury and Systinet offerings to deliver predictable, consistent business results from SOA initiatives; provide the control and visibility required to ensure the reuse of business services, and optimise the quality, performance and availability of SOA applications.
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and certain regulatory approvals, is expected to close during the first quarter of 2006 and is expected to be dilutive to Mercury`s earnings in 2006 and accretive in 2007.
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Mercury, a world-leading provider of business technology optimisation (BTO) solutions, appointed EOH as the master reseller in sub Saharan Africa in May 2005. EOH formed a new business unit called Mercury Africa and focuses on helping customers optimise the business value of IT.
EOH is a business and technology solutions provider creating lifelong partnerships by developing business and IT strategies, supplying and implementing solutions and managing enterprise-wide business systems and processes for medium to large clients. EOH operates in the following three clusters of business units as a fully integrated business:
Consulting - Concentrated under the EOH Consulting brand are business units offering services ranging from strategic and business process consulting, project services, change management, supply chain optimisation, and education. The EOH Consulting business unit is responsible for delivering IT solutions that make business sense. We focus on providing remarkable technology solutions using robust methodologies to perform along the following four dimensions of IT excellence:
* Business-alignment
* Quality
* Risk management
* Cost management
Technology - Through a number of subsidiary companies, EOH is able to sell, implement, and support a range of world-class business applications including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence, advanced planning and scheduling, e-commerce and manufacturing execution systems (MES).
Outsourcing - EOH offers comprehensive maintenance and support of client`s IT infrastructure and applications through the rendering of full IT outsourcing, application hosting and managed services. In addition EOH offers full business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
EOH has a presence in all major centres in South Africa and Botswana, and operates in the rest of Africa.
Mercury
Mercury Interactive Corporation (OTC: MERQ), the global leader in business technology optimisation (BTO) software, is committed to helping customers optimise the business value of information technology. Founded in 1989, Mercury conducts business worldwide and is one of the largest enterprise software companies today. Mercury provides software and services for IT governance, application delivery and application management. Customers worldwide rely on Mercury offerings to govern the priorities, processes and people of IT and test and manage the quality and performance of business-critical applications. Mercury BTO offerings are complemented by technologies and services from global business partners. For more information, please visit http://www.mercury.com.
Systinet
Systinet provides a leading foundation for SOA governance and lifecycle management. Founded in 2000, Systinet`s proven and standards-based products, including Systinet Registry and Systinet Policy Manager, help enable IT organisations to rapidly leverage existing technology investments, provide interoperability between heterogeneous systems, and better align business processes with IT. Customers receive the benefits of a simpler, faster, standards-based way to dramatically improve IT responsiveness and technology asset reuse, while helping to maximise the ROI for SOA.
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