Mercury bridges the gaps

newsmaker Mercury Interactive has evolved since it began providing software quality testing products in 1991. Today, the company is most known for its Business Technology Optimization (BTO) strategy, which focuses on helping enterprises align IT with business objectives.

Mercury's BTO offerings for application delivery, application management, and IT governance tout the value of helping customers maximize the business value of IT.

The company continues to actively engage organizations to put a business spin on everything IT.

The company's chief technology officer, Oren Ariel, tells ZDNet Asia, why, even after spending five years fine-tuning the BTO framework, Mercury is not yet done helping customers balance the task of optimizing application quality, performance, and availability, and managing IT costs, risks, and compliance.

Having been with Mercury since 2000, how would you describe the changes that has culminated in the company's BTO strategy today?
In general, Mercury is a very customer-driven company. We fine-tune our roadmap with a lot of our customers. We feel that it is part of our day job, whether you are a technical person with the company or you are a field person, that the customer is whom we listen to. So whenever we set foot in the field we try to facilitate that interaction.

This is the agenda that we've been driving several years now and it is unfolding in stages. The first step we took was in 2000 when we took our core technology from the testing side of the [company] and we had a hunch that this technology was incredibly valuable to our customers. They could do ongoing [application] testing 24 by 7 in production. But in production, we discovered a slew of new issues--we had the Internet, real customers that had different patterns of usage, and so on. We produced more and more functionality into that side of the house until we found ourselves five years later actually connecting it all together into a single suite. On the way, we picked up a few missing pieces like IT governance. And five years later, we are now launching an agenda which talks about aligning IT organizations with business goals [formulated] around the core products that we already have in place.

How far are you away from completing that agenda?
We still have a long way to go, and my job in the company is really to make sure that from a product standpoint, we can really look at the product as a single integrated suite with a common set of technologies. This will allow us, for example, to offer a single view point into reports and metrics that are being collected by the products, using dashboards.

As chief technology officer, what do you have to do to fill in those gaps that you've just talked about?
A lot of what I do is to look at the 'blind' spots in the strategy that we have to go out and fill in terms of external acquisitions and internal development. When I first joined the company, it was a very successful medium-sized company with one-third of the revenues and one-third of the number of employees it has today. It just shows you how much the company has grown in the last five or six years. The roots of the company were in quality management, of which the fundamentals are measure, manage, maximize, which is what we're applying today in different areas, not just in quality assurance but also on managing requirements, managing demand, and managing production systems.

How would you convince those customers that are not yet sold on aligning IT with business goals, that that is the way to go?
The question varies because we have younger businesses as well as more established businesses coming under the umbrella of business technology optimization. We're seeing more of the newer customers in the IT governance and the application management areas. The Mercury approach allows you to leverage what you already have and what you've invested in, and offers the link between those and the actual business. There are a lot of catalysts that lead people to this direction. Compliance is one, and once you have to start to document, you begin to think about the need to automate things. Another good catalyst is the whole outsourcing and off-shoring issue, which is about taking some of the non-core functionalities of IT and handing them off to somebody who would do it at lower costs.