INDUSTRY

Today, Mercury Interactive Corporation , the global leader in business technology optimization (BTO) software, announced its BTO strategy for service oriented architecture (SOA). The Mercury BTO strategy for SOA 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. The Mercury SOA strategy will be showcased to more than 3,000 IT professionals and decision makers at Mercury World 2006. 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. Many IT organizations 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 organization 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; and * 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," said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. "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," said Yuval Scarlat, senior vice president of products at Mercury. "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 BTO Strategy for SOA Mercury's strategy is built on optimizing 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 organizations 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. Mercury's BTO strategy for SOA enables companies to start risk-reducing SOA initiatives in a number of key areas, including: * Organizations embarking on SOA for the first time may start with Mercury's industry-leading Systinet SOA governance offerings to establish a system of record to manage services throughout their lifecycle. Using Mercury SOA governance can help make sure the right services are in place to meet business objectives and enable visibility into the source, purpose, reusability and location of all planned and deployed services; * Organizations that have deployed services into production may start with Mercury SOA management offerings to monitor service level agreements, manage changes, map services and infrastructure, and identify and resolve problems before they impact the business. Using Mercury SOA management can help customers get control and visibility over their SOA production environment and resolve SOA problems before they impact the business. Using Mercury SOA Management can help ensure that services in production deliver the promised business and IT results. * Organizations preparing to deploy new or changed services may use Mercury's SOA quality offerings to make sure that services are tested and will meet the functional and performance requirements of the business. Using Mercury SOA quality products can help prevent low-quality services from creating catastrophic failures in production, increasing trust and driving reuse. "At Motorola, SOA makes our business more agile and efficient, resulting in faster project delivery and enabling our development groups to shift their focus from simply maintaining applications to composing services and applications to meet new business requirements," said Toby Redshaw, vice president of IT strategy, architecture, and e-business at Motorola. "To be successful at SOA, you need a foundation that supports governance, quality management, and management in production. Mercury and its Systinet division play a part in helping ensure Motorola's ongoing SOA success." "For SOA to be successful requires a lifecycle approach to the way services are planned, developed, and operated," said Frank Kenney, vice president of research at Gartner. "This approach requires a closed-loop between service planning, development, and runtime to control, report, and manage changes across the lifecycle." Mercury SOA Ecosystem Strategy In order to support the broad range of SOA applications platforms and technologies, Mercury has partnered with some of the world's leading companies. For example, Mercury supports SAP AG's business-driven approach to enterprise SOA. Enterprise SOA enables customers to measurably increase business agility and flexibility, simplify integration efforts and reduce overall IT costs. Mercury also supports Oracle Fusion Middleware to help provide the foundation of service-oriented architectures and business solutions that streamline business and IT operations, improve the accuracy and timeliness of decisions and help drive security and compliance initiatives. Systinet also provides the SOA Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF), which was created to address the broader interdependencies of the security, business integration, business intelligence, and enterprise information integration vendors. The Systinet GIF allows member companies to publish services and associated policies in a standardized way, be alerted about changes within the registry, and gain access to metadata about the range of services that make up the customer's SOA. Ten partners already support the Systinet SOA Governance Interoperability Framework.