After a Merger, Time to Digest



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March 15, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
In the world of application life-cycle management, larger players such as Borland Software, IBM Rational and Serena Software have scrambled to acquire best-of-breed companies with the objective of offering full ALM suites. Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Mercury Interactive has been in the spotlight recently, and although it’s known more for selling printer supplies than software, HP dropped the Mercury brand name on the assumption that its own brand still carried weight with enterprise customers.

What happens, exactly, when the door to the conference room slams shut and high-end business executives put their heads together to come up with the best method of integrating an acquired company? Many factors, including the need for proper synergy between products and technologies, the financial impact to the companies, and the amount of disruption to customers, merit consideration.

The best path toward success in ALM integration, according to analysts, is to have a strong understanding of the market. “The key to a strong integration is a holistic understanding of the market needs, requirements and the creation of a synergistic environment to effectively serve the needs of the customer,” said Voke research group founder Theresa Lanowitz.

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, offered another perspective. “The key to successful integration is to stop thinking in terms of integration altogether. Instead, think in terms of architecture. Integration should be a byproduct of service composition in the context of SOA. It should be something the business does with the capabilities and information at its disposal—not something IT has to do before the business can get any value out of the technology.”

In order to integrate the products being acquired with Mercury, HP based its plans around Mercury’s original “Center” product lines, creating nine Software Centers focusing on different customer bases. This new perspective showed “that there was very little overlap in the HP and Mercury products. In instances of overlap, we have a plan to converge on the best solution for the customer over the next 18 months, based on the size of the installed base, maturity of the product platform and technical competitiveness,” said Robin Purohit, vice president of products for HP.




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