Mercury to acquire application-mapping start-up

Executives at Mercury said the firm will begin selling Appilog's software technology, which helps companies spot problems in business applications, as part of Mercury's product line in the third quarter of this year. The transaction is expected to be completed by July.

Mercury last September launched its business technology optimization strategy. Under the plan, the company sells a range of tools designed to help businesses plan technology spending and make better use of resources.

Appilog is one of several start-ups that have developed software for cataloging the dependencies among the component pieces of complex business applications, such as hardware servers, databases and network connections. This so-called application-mapping software is designed to track the performance of applications and more quickly pinpoint problems in a company's technology infrastructure when they occur.

Mercury executives said on Wednesday that Appilog's application-mapping software will work in conjunction with Mercury's diagnostic tools to streamline the troubleshooting process. Mercury executives said they expect that other application-mapping specialists will be acquired by established management companies, saying the technology is important to deriving value from corporate technology systems.

"A generic understanding of your infrastructure isn't interesting unless you can correlate it back to the business impact," said Christopher Lochhead, Mercury's chief marketing officer.

In the second half of this year, Mercury will deepen the integration between Appilog's software and Mercury's application management line, he said.

The past two months have seen a rise in mergers and acquisitions in the systems-management arena. IBM last month purchased Candle, which makes mainframe management tools, and management software company BMC acquired Marimba.