If you have been away from the software testing environment for a few years you may

wondering what happened to all those great testing tools from Mercury Interactive, or you might

be new to testing and keep hearing other people referring to Mercury tools and be confused as to

what they are talking about.

About Mercury

Mercury Interactive Corporation provided business technology

optimization (BTO) software and services in the United States

and internationally. It offered a range of BTO software and

services in application delivery for testing software quality

and performance in pre-production, application management

for monitoring and managing application availability in

production, and IT governance for managing IT’s portfolio of

projects, processes, priorities, and resources. The company

provided solutions for application delivery, application

management, governance, IT service management,

ERP/CRM, J2EE, and .NET applications to companies and government agencies across

the world and was best known for products such as LoadRunner , QTP and Test Director.

On 7th November 2006 Mercury announced that it had been acquired by HP

The deal, which was the largest software acquisition in HP's history, integrated Mercury’s

application capabilities with HP’s broad portfolio of management solutions to create a new

software organisation – HP Software –designed to lead the industry in Business Technology

Optimisation, or BTO.

The good news is that HP has continued to develop and support all those great Mercury products

like LoadRunner and QTP. Along the way, as products have evolved and developed some products

have been renamed or become subsumed into broader HP offerings. For example TestDirector

has now been replaced by HP Quality Center.

What the Acquisition Means for You

At the time of the acquisition Stephen Davis, Managing Director of StarBase, commented:

“At StarBase, we have always measured success in terms of delivering against our clients’

commercial priorities. With HP’s acquisition of Mercury, for the first time CIOs will have

available to them world class solutions from one supplier to manage and automate their IT

strategy, application delivery and operations. As a long standing Mercury partner, we look

forward to working with HP Software and offering the enhanced range of solutions

to our clients.”

The continued development and enhancement of the Mercury range of tools and its incorporation

into the wider HP portfolio has proved to be very beneficial. We do recognise that not

everyone will be aware of the changes, but if you go to our pages on

HP Performance Testing Tools and HP Functional Testing Tools you will find

details about those Mercury products you used to rely on, or keep hearing about.