IT must be more accountable, says Mercury

SINGAPORE--Businesses are spending so much energy deploying and maintaining their software that they have hardly any time left to monitor the effectiveness of these applications, says a senior executive from Mercury Interactive.

Speaking to ZDNet Asia, Wilson Tan, the management software vendor's Asia-Pacific president, posed: "Why does IT today need to be more accountable?" That is because organizations spend about 80 percent of the time building applications and managing infrastructure, and there is insufficient time spent on business outcomes, he explained. He noted that it is then important for companies to track the lifecycle of an IT application and how it affects their business.

Mercury this week launched a fresh portfolio of products aimed at helping organizations maximize the business objectives of the IT projects they undertake.

Called the Mercury BTO (Business Technology Optimization) Enterprise, the new suite of products includes software that tracks change and performance of applications during their lifecycles, as well as updated versions of Mercury Optimization Centers across all product lines.

Touting the Mercury BTO Enterprise as a culmination of investments including acquisitions, totalling US$500 million over a course of a few years, Tan said the new products help organizations look more keenly at "how IT can provide the basis of good business outcomes".

Essentially, Mercury BTO Enterprise is catered to help disparate IT teams such as portfolio managers, quality and performance assurance managers, business analysts, and IT operations teams work more effectively by integrating and automating key functions across IT governance, application delivery, and application management, he said.

Tan added that the new suite of products is targeted at larger enterprises, such as financial services institutions, telecommunications service providers and transportation companies.

Another new offering within Mercury BTO Enterprise, called the Application Change Lifecycle, lets customers manage application changes starting from demand and through to production. For instance, it allows business managers set up templates to monitor newly-installed applications, to make sure that as they run, service level agreements (SLAs) are in line with business performance.

This is especially crucial these days, in view of the emphasis on governance and compliance requirements, said Tan.

Businesses which have already installed an application can use Mercury's Application Performance Lifecycle product, which lets customers test, diagnose and manage application performance from pre-production through production.

Updates galore
Also new in the Mercury BTO Enterprise are updates to:

• Mercury IT Governance Center 7.0, which helps users manage the portfolio of IT projects;
• Mercury Quality Center 8.2, which lets customers automate software quality management and testing across a range of application environments;
• Mercury Performance Center 8.1, which allows customers to automate application performance testing and help identify and resolve performance bottlenecks; and
• Mercury Business Availability Center 6.0, which helps identify and resolve problems with applications in production.

The Singapore Management University is the first customers of the Mercury BTO Enterprise in the Asia-Pacific. The education institution is using the Mercury Performance Center 8.1, said Tan.

The Mercury BTO Enterprise offerings are now available through Mercury Managed Services.