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Solstice Software

"HP, Mercury, and Systinet now provide a strong solution for governance, monitoring, and testing," says Chris Benedetto, Vice President of Marketing for Solstice Software.

"This is good news for HP customers looking to embrace SOA to simplify the complexity in their environments. The next step is to see what solutions they provide for testing and validation of everything that is happening
behind the screens and at the application level. That's the layer that supports the SOA, so it will be interesting to see where they take this," said Bendetto.

"This is a big move for HP. The part that is of interest from the SOA perspective is the Systinet division of Mercury, said Miko Matsumura, VP for Technology Standards at Infravio.

"What does this mean? First of all, it's a huge move for HP and securely puts HP at the center of the Systems Management arena for emerging SOA initiatives. IT tends to be about two fundamental forces, CONTROL and AGILITY. On the agility side are typically distributed business units — which are tied to application platforms and are interested in deploying applications rapidly and with the least possible amount of hassle.

"On the control side are typically central IT people like the CIO. The CIO maintains job security by establishing control of IT systems at all times — this includes visibility but also policy enforcement. From this perspective, the Systems Management assets of HP and the IT Management assets of Mercury (and the SOA Governance capabilities of Systinet) provide the ultimate control suite for SOA as well as IT management assets.

"So this is great, right? HP + Mercury + Systinet = Ultimate Control.

"This is a very, very attractive combination from a value perspective. However, this sale is a very centralized CIO-centric sale. The line of business owners want SOA for AGILITY purposes, and this is where Infravio has had tremendous success and strength —whether it's enabling business to business integration through Service Delivery Contracts(tm) or new business process centric capabilities via BPEL or other process engines. These types of drivers are attractive to lines of business.

"So the turf war between Registry Repository giants continues, with Systinet moving squarely into the network management layer and focusing on control, and Infravio, the strongest independent player focusing on agility and business enablement through SOA Governance."

Posted by elizabeth in M&A | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From Alan Rodger, Research Analyst, Butler Group:

The Mercury acquisition is expected to increase the size of the HP Software business to more than $2 billion in annual revenue. It brings together the strength of HP OpenView systems, network and IT service management software with Mercury's strength in application management, application delivery, IT governance and service-oriented architecture governance.

Pressures to shorten delivery timescales, and accommodate increasing volumes of change very quickly, are leading customers to see the whole IT lifecycle as a single process, rather than separate worlds of application development and live operation.

HP's acquisition of Mercury can offer customers the capability to get to grips with issues around the business outputs from IT within the same framework as more technical IT delivery issues. This has the potential to propel HP further beyond the data centre into customer organisations, and to tackle application performance, quality, portfolio management, governance, and other high-value IT management issues that directly affect organisations' ability to deliver business value from IT.

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From OnStrategies' Tony Baer (and a longer column has just gone live as an ebizQ feature):

Well, it finally happened. HP put Mercury out of its misery, making a pretty good offer in the bargain. Mercury, of course, has been plagued by a scandal overt allegations that its three former top executives
(since fired) unfairly gamed their stock options. Significantly, recent SEC investigations are revealing that that Mercury was hardly alone among Silicon Valley companies in back dating executive options.

But looking ahead, the deal makes a good bit of sense. For the most part, Mercury's technology complements HP's OpenView portfolio. And as we note below, scandal or not, Mercury's IT governance product strategy
was beginning to hit the wall with its lack of direct connection to IT operations.

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Dana Gardner has a podcast up today about why software vendors have embraced Eclipse, the open source standards organization.

Joining Dana on the podcast are BEA Systems' Bill Roth, the vice president of the BEA Workshop Business Unit, and Wind River's Steve Heintz, the director of product management for developer technologies.

Have a listen as "we learn why very different large software tools, platform, and runtimes providers are hip to Eclipse. And they also see Eclipse as a model of other software projects to come."

Check it out here!

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You might not know this, but ebizQ maintains a very interesting, comprehensive white paper library, to which people can submit their white papers, for posterity, if not fame and fortune.

Follow this link if you want to submit your paper (one per company per quarter, please). To see all the white papers in our library, sponsored and unsponsored, click here.

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I spoke with Paul McSpurren, President and CEO of Whitehill Technologies, about the company's recent purchase of InSystems from Standard Register.

Click below to hear my podcast with Paul McSpurren.

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Axentis and the Open Compliance and Ethics Group (OCEG), a nonprofit consortium of "some of the most respected companies, nonprofits, business leaders and academics in the world," today announced the results of a survey of over 200 GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) practitioners.

According to a release, the survey pinpoints key technology considerations for a successful and sustainable GRC initiative.

Key findings from the recent OCEG survey include:

*More than 50 percent of participants have not implemented a GRC roadmap.

*58 percent of the respondents who have a roadmap in place stated that their compliance needs were being met, while 85 percent of those who did not have a roadmap felt their compliance needs were not being satisfied.

*70 percent of those who had an IT resource assigned specifically to GRC answered that their needs were being addressed, while 71 percent of those who did not have an assigned IT resource felt their needs were not adequately being satisfied.

*A distinct correlation exists between program success and the percentage of applications utilized for GRC management efforts. Practitioners with 50 percent or more of their applications being GRC-specific achieved a 100 percent positive response to meeting compliance needs.

“GRC processes impact all large corporations regardless of their industry or geographic location. Effective management of these mandates, whether Sarbanes-Oxley or COBIT, will greatly determine the ongoing success of each organization,” said Ted Frank, president of Axentis and co-chair of the OCEG Technology Council. “The results of this survey strongly indicate that companies with comprehensive plans of attack and competent, dedicated personnel are better positioned to manage these dangerous waters and achieve superior overall performance.”

“This survey is part of OCEG’s unceasing effort help organizations fully understand the steps that must be taken to effectively manage GRC applications and achieve a sustainable compliance program,” added Frank. “In the future we will introduce additional surveys, the results from which will be dedicated to answering other key questions and providing guidance to all issues GRC-related.”

The results are available on the Axentis Web site >here.

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This graphic, published with permission of Forrester Research, shows the latest positions of the ESB vendors in the latest Forrester Wave: Enterprise Service Bus Q2 2006 Report.

Forrester evaluated leading enterprise service bus (ESB) vendors across more than 100 criteria and found that Cape Clear Software and BEA Systems were the top two performers overall. Other vendors in the leader category (from the highest score down) are Software AG, Progress (Sonic), IBM, and IONA Technologies. These vendors all scored well in the connection, mediation, and control and change categories. Close behind are two strong performers, Fiorano and PolarLake. The two first-time entrants in this evaluation (Software AG and IBM) both scored exceptionally well and highlight the ability of larger organizations to quickly ramp up new product functionality.

**The above graphic is from “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Bus, Q2 2006,” Forrester Research, Inc., June 30, 2006. The Forrester Wave is a graphical representation of Forrester's call on a market and is plotted using a detailed spreadsheet with exposed scores, weightings, and comments. Forrester does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in the above graphic. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information or to purchase this report please visit, >http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,38696,00.html.

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I spoke with Cape Clear founder and CEO Annrai O'Toole today, about two recent reports that came out last week, from Gartner and Forrester Research, which both placed Cape Clear's ESB as a top product in the marketplace.

Click below to hear what Annrai had to say.

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Today, I interviewed Arthur Fontaine, a Senior Offering Manager at IBM, about the annoucement that Lotus Notes is now available to run on Linux. It's big news so I asked him some big questions!

The news is here.

Click below to listen to the Podcast!

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I just did a podcast with Arthur Fontaine, a senior offering manager with IBM, about today's announcement that Lotus Notes is now going to run on Linux. Check out the news, and then come back in a couple of hours to hear the podcast!

The news is here!

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Cape Clear's Annrai O'Toole has a "worth a read," blog post up today, about what's going on in the wonderful world of the Enterprise Service Bus.

He references two recent reports from Gartner and Forrester, which both make attempts to assess the competitive nature of the ESB marketplace. Both reports, Annrai indicates, point to the overall health of the market and its enormous growth potential.

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