Mercury goes shopping--HP and EMC nowhere to be seen

Rumors have been swirling the HP or EMC would acquire Mercury Interactive, but for now the company is continuing on its own buying binge. "It's further evidence that we want to be the acquiring company as opposed to the acquired company," Christopher Lochhead, Mercury chief marketing officer, told me today after the acquistions were announced. Mercury acquired Tefensoft, an R&D team in Israel with some core technology, and IT service management software and personnel from Cincinnati, OH-based Vertical Solutions, Inc. (VSI) for $18.5 million in cash. In January, Mercury acquired Systinet, which provides SOA governance and lifecycle management software and services, for $105 million in cash. In 2004, Mercury bought Appilog, which had auto-discovery and application mapping software, for $49 million in cash.
VSI's PowerHelp IT product and core technology from both VSI and Tefensoft give Mercury an advanced set of ITIL-based technologies for its Service Desk product, according to Robin Purohit, Mercury vice president of application management products. "We get a fully functional ITIL-designed service desk product, and more process orientation, particularly for the help desk and other technologies in development related to ITIL, which will manifest themselves in integrated service management offerings throughout the year," he said.  Enterprises are moving from reactive trouble ticket systems to more proactive process frameworks, such as ITIL, to  manage  IT environments, he added. "Most service desks have agents on the phone managing problems," Lochhead said. " We are connecting data around application performance and availability, and proactively managing and monitoring applications and using ITIL based frameworks, versus trouble tickets, to do problem diagnosis and resolution."

Of course, Mercury eating some smaller fish doesn't mean that a bigger fish isn't waiting to swallow it up. The company is still dealing with the aftermath of some corporate malfeasance, but it's a market leader and currently has a market cap of around $3 billion. Stay tuned...