Tech giant HP has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement with business technology optimization (BTO) solutions provider Mercury Interactive to acquire it for an approximate price of $4.5 billion.
The acquisition is likely to strengthen HP's OpenView line of offerings with Mercury's application management, application delivery, IT governance and SOA governance range of offerings.
California based Mercury provides application performance testing software that allows users to check the performance of various applications such as database, middleware against their existing infrastructure to detect flaws and hidden weaknesses.
The Mercury acquisition also affirms HP's official entry into the BTO space. The move makes sense for HP as it already sells performance-monitoring tools through OpenView Performance Manager/Agents/ Monitor solutions and the acquired capabilities from Mercury would be easier for it to integrate with its existing offerings.
Thomas E Hogan, Senior VP, Software, HP said, "HP's software strategy is to be the clear leader in end-to-end enterprise IT management and help our customers tightly align IT priorities with changing business requirements. Combining our HP OpenView offerings with Mercury's BTO Enterprise offerings will integrate the many building blocks of enterprise IT management into one complete solution for the entire IT lifecycle, from planning to deployment and operations."
In 2006 May, Mercury rolled out a new tool designed to let companies automate change management and carefully assess associated risk with new application and infrastructure modifications. With HP gradually maturing into a prominent infrastructure management vendor, capabilities such as Mercury's Change Control Management tool could do a lot to fortify its credentials.
The merger is expected to close in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2006.
