Mercury and Points Offshore
October 15, 2006 —
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Looking for an independent voice on the HP-Mercury deal, I finally caught up with industry analyst Theresa Lanowitz, who has left Gartner and started up her own firm, Voke (like in pro-voke). She shares our concerns about the future of Mercury in a company that has not had success selling software in the past.
HP customers might think of the acquisition as giving them something more, but Mercury customers won’t be interested in HP’s network view of the world, or in OpenView, to which everything at HP slants, Lanowitz said.
Mercury’s management team, led by Tony Zingale, was nimble and aggressive, helping the company to a 50 percent share of the software testing market. Its engineers, she said, have great visions for what Mercury’s architecture needs to be for the future.
Now, it has become part of HP’s staid approach, and the target of smaller, more nimble and aggressive companies. Empirix, another testing tools provider, is offering a free one-to-one switch from Mercury products to its own. Opportunities also exist for Compuware, IBM Rational and others, she said.
Lanowitz speculated that the US$4.5 billion HP paid for Mercury was driven by bidding, mentioning such companies as Oracle, SAP and EMC as potential suitors. “HP isn’t one I even would have guessed” to have an interest in Mercury, Lanowitz said.
She believes the traditional Mercury customer base will be looking to evaluate products from other companies, since only a very small portion of HP’s revenue comes from software. If you’re a test tools customer, Lanowitz said, you’d have to be leery of a company “that gets 51 percent of its revenue from toner.”
Shifting gears, Lanowitz said her company will be focusing on the application life cycle, with a mission to move the industry beyond the status quo. “Things are largely the same since 1999,” she said. “IT is working on tactical things, and not being strategic. The IT model of today is really outmoded, and the application life cycle is one of those big areas.”
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