Mercury unveils BTO strategy for service-oriented architecture

Mercury Interactive Corporation, the global leader in business technology optimisation (BTO) software, recently announced its BTO strategy for service-oriented architecture (SOA).

The strategy details how customers use Mercury BTO Enterprise and Mercury's Systinet offerings together to mitigate SOA business risk and deliver high-quality, measurable business outcomes from SOA initiatives.

Mercury is represented in Sub-Saharan Africa by master distributor Mercury Africa, a division of the EOH Group of Companies.

Johan Cloete, managing director of Mercury Africa, says Mercury's BTO strategy for SOA addresses the fundamental challenges companies have with both achieving the business agility and flexibility promised by SOA while protecting the business from damaging SOA-related problems.

He says too many IT organisations struggle with delivering consistent SOA results due to the large numbers of business problems created by poor governance, uncontrolled service changes, low quality services, and the inability to fix SOA-related issues in production.

"A single SOA problem will often stall a project, reduce trust and funding from the line of business, and in some cases freeze an enterprise-wide SOA initiative. This has created pressure across the entire IT organisation to adopt an integrated, lifecycle approach to prevent costly SOA setbacks, reduce the risk of SOA problems from disrupting the business, and build incremental success and results."

Mercury's SOA strategy is purpose-built to help customers establish a low-risk, highly controlled approach for SOA governance, quality and management. Using Mercury SOA offerings, customers can address some of the biggest challenges in SOA including:

* Getting control over services that cannot be reused consistently throughout the enterprise and violate compliance standards.
* Decreasing the large volume of work required to test the exponential number of functions, interrelationships and requirements between services and the applications they support.
* Reducing the risk of low-quality, poor-performing services creating an epidemic of damaging business problems.
* Preventing a service change from triggering a 'domino-effect' of problems with the applications and automated business processes that are dependant on that service.
* Identifying and resolving SOA-related problems before they negatively impact the business.

"Mitigating the business risks inherent in implementing SOA has become one of the top business/IT alignment priorities today," says Cloete. "Many companies are in a 'SOA purgatory', where they are struggling to measure clear business results from their SOA initiatives. The associated risks are forcing many CIOs to move their investments away from risky approaches to SOA that do not yield clear business results, to more pragmatic approaches that both capture the value of SOA and protect the business from its risks."

Customers have zero tolerance for purely visionary, proprietary-based strategies that do nothing to address real-world SOA challenges of risk mitigation, governance, change management, quality, and problem resolution. Mercury's BTO track record for success is unmatched for helping customers reduce risk and drive positive business outcomes from their most critical initiatives such as SOA, IT service management and compliance.

Mercury's strategy is built on optimising SOA governance, quality and management to help reduce SOA business risk across the lifecycle. Mercury's BTO strategy for SOA provides a flexible and incremental approach with multiple starting points that allows organisations to implement their SOA initiatives in a way that conforms to their business priorities, budgets and tolerance for risk. Customers are using Mercury BTO products to help confidently plan, test, deploy, govern and manage SOA initiatives.

"For SOA to be successful requires a lifecycle approach to the way services are planned, developed and operated," said Cloete. "This approach requires a closed-loop between service planning, development and runtime to control, report and manage changes across the lifecycle."

Attend the Mercury User Group of Southern Africa (MUGSA) and find out more. Register online now at www.mugsa.co.za, or contact Quinette Swart on (011) 607 8100.