Going all or nothing, Mercury Interactive Corp.
executives earlier this week rolled out its business technology optimization (BTO)
product suite.
The announcement signals the company’s new focus and direction on
business application optimization, a buzzword already long-familiar in
the industry and one software companies are looking at to drive software
sales.
Slowly, best-of-breed software solutions are being replaced by suites
that integrate end-to-end along the information chain within
corporations. Mercury officials said the future direction of the
company would center around its “optimization centers,” four business
components addressing different areas of the enterprise.
Optimization, in this case, deals with IT projects as well as
integration. According to Chris Lochhead, Mercury Interactive’s chief
marketing officer, keeping costs and time spent on a project mean just
as much as integration.
“Tech spending is about one-half of capital spending, so there’s been a
revolution to optimize IT,” Lochhead said. “The defining part is
finding areas that bring ROI faster.”
He points to figures that show there’s a lot of work to be done in the
optimization/integration arena. Ninety percent of IT projects run late,
he said, 50 percent are over budget and 50 percent of the projects that
are completed don’t cover the requirement needs of the project.
The new BTO approach, according to company officials, is to bring
disparate IT functions under one umbrella, driving down costs while
improving the overall efficiency of the IT department.
Enter the four components helping make up the BTO: Quality Center,
Performance Center, Business Availability Center and IT Governance
Center. Each is a separate component that can address pressing needs
within the IT department, while remaining compatible with the others for
future growth. Depending on the product, Lochhead said the software
starts around $20,000.
“We’re not forcing our customers to eat the elephant in one bite,”
Lochhead said. “They can buy into it in small bites.”
- The Governance Center ties in resource, demand, project and
portfolio management into one area and is a product that came as a
result of its acquisit
ion of Kintana earlier this year. - Quality Center is a software set to ensure the quality of the
project, ranging from business processes testing to functional
tests. - Performance Center makes sure the nuts-and-bolts, as well as
performance, of the project are met. They include load testing,
application diagnostics and capacity planning. - Customer assessments, end-user and service-level management make up
part of the Business Availability Center, a software suite of “best
practices” to run on projects already in the field.
“We still think there’s a lot of work to do in the optimization
centers,” Lochhead said. “With BTO, we can get that figure of 90
percent of projects being late down to 40 percent. We want to get that
down to five or 10 percent.”
