Mercury Announces Next Version of BTO
October 2005
Since acquiring Kintana in 2003, Mercury Interactive Corp has been recasting itself from software quality and testing towards IT governance.
The latest release of Mercury's Business Technology Optimization, the umbrella for all of its product lines, will add new dashboard and workflow level integration so that IT governance information is more readily shared with software teams in the trenches, while the project management office gains more current views on the health of software in the portfolio.
The new offering, branded BTO Enterprise, also adds enhancements to each of the individual modules, including Quality Center, Performance Center, Business Availability, and IT Governance.
Among the major additions is a new change management feature that ties in each of the centers. IT governance gains concurrent views into changes to software that impact quality, performance, and service levels. It tracks the impact of a change from test through deployment and production, maintaining an audit trail.
For instance, IT Governance Center expands the ability to look at the Net Present Value (NPV) of projects by adding a new portfolio management feature that allows users to see the NPV, not just for a single project, but a group of them.
Mercury has also added browser-based views to project management, resource management, and time management modules of IT governance, so developers and others outside the project or program management office can gain access to project resource information pertaining to their efforts.
Quality Center, which includes business process testing, which provides business analyst level views of software processes, and functional testing, which provider coder-level views of the testing of user interface elements, gains new views into related activities.
For instance, business process testers gain access to over 20 key performance indicator dashboards from IT Governance Center. Additionally, they gain access to WinRunner tests assets, so analysts can reuse the GUI tests developed by the software QA team. Additionally, Quality Center adds new integration with Eclipse and Visual Studio, where testing is done directly within the IDE without having to switch programs.
Performance Center, which includes Mercury's LoadRunner load testing tools, gains a dashboard view into resource and demand management from IT governance center, so performance tests can be better coordinated. Conversely, IT Governance center gains a dashboard view into the application readiness dashboard maintained by Performance Center.
Business Availability Center, which oversees end user performance, system availability, and service level management, is adding a new wizard for defining service levels that are measured.
And they are providing new top-down views that map business services to application software. For instance, this could involve a web service that pulls functionality exposed from packaged applications like SAP or Oracle, or homegrown software.
The view would document the software recipe of the service, while enabling that service to be tracked using the SLA criteria defined through the wizards.
Mercury has not yet announced availability of BTO Enterprise or the next versions of the point products.
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