Spotlight

Helping optimise IT

Mercury's business technology optimisation helps companies align information technology with business, says Vinutha V

Three years after setting up shop in the country, Mercury India, a business technology optimisation (BTO) company, has 223 customers. Back in 1989, US-based Mercury Interactive Corporation began to market software quality testing tools. At that time, most system management tools available in the market did not deliver on their promises, and there was a big gap between what was promised and what was delivered. Mercury then ventured into IT optimisation.

Tight IT budgets come with the danger that CIOs lose out on quality while squeezing the most from their IT rupee. Additionally, aligning IT with business goals to maximise IT’s business value is another challenge. According to a recent Gartner report, about 40 percent of defects in software applications come to light only post-implementation. To this Mercury says it has a solution. It offers IT quality management practices coupled with software and services to align IT strategy and execution with business drivers. In addition, it provides software and services to govern the priorities, people and processes of IT; deliver and manage applications; and integrate IT strategy and execution. Its offerings are to improve quality and performance of applications and manage IT costs, risks and compliance.

Towards automation

We expect our IT governance solutions to take off when industries move towards regulatory compliance T Srinivasan Managing Director Mercury

Mercury started its Indian liaison office in 2002 to provide logistics support, and sold its solutions through resellers. The liaison office became an Indian subsidiary in 2004. The initial focus was to strengthen its partnerships. In August that year, it signed Sonata Information Technology as a distributor. Says T Srinivasan, Mercury’s Managing Director, “Applications such as ERP and CRM were getting mired in failure to execute. Manual performance testing prevailed. With our entry, awareness has stepped up about the availability of automated tools.”

The initial hurdle for Mercury was to identify customers who were concerned about quality. Effective awareness initiatives through system integrators and events have helped the company. “We have been noticing companies slowly graduating towards automated testing tools and solutions. In fact, companies are moving from just using tools to the quality systems,” remarks Srinivasan. Assuming that 15 percent of ERP customers worldwide use automated testing tools, penetration is on the lower side in India.

Making a difference

Mercury’s Indian customers span the telecom, banking, finance and manufacturing verticals. To name just one, IT governance at Birlasoft is powered by Mercury’s tools. As these verticals rely heavily on IT, the integration of IT with business becomes crucial. Because IT aligns with the business and focusses on technology as an enabler, enterprises need to assess their overall maturity and approach to how quality is built into applications. The understanding of the need for performance and functional testing has been higher in these verticals.

Risk of failure is high among telecom companies as they have isolated IT applications in billing, communications, CRM and other functionalities. Srinivasan cites a particular telecom customer and says, “When they wanted to go live with ERP, they installed our LoadRunner TestCenter (a performance testing solution) before they went live. The company has thousands of users, and yet it was able to successfully run the application. We helped them reduce the risk of application failure.” One of Mercury’s state government customers was unable to deploy a high-profile application, and manual testing proved inadequate to detect the cause. LoadRunner scripts (tools) overcame the problem. The inter-dependency of various IT applications that run the core banking applications is challenging. Mercury’s customers in the banking and financial industry have been able to tackle these challenges by using its QuickTest Professional scripts.

User awareness

The company has realised the importance of creating user-awareness. To offer direct access and assist testing professionals in learning about the latest application testing products and best practices, Mercury has opened a Centre of Excellence (CoE) at Wipro, Bangalore. The centre provides access to tools and best practices in automated testing. Mercury has extended it (the CoE) to Wipro’s campuses in Pune and Hyderabad as well. The company is also considering the opening of more such centres at campuses of other systems integrators. Further, it aims to promote training to a greater extent as part of its Enablement Programme. Partnering with integrators such as Wipro, TCS, Satyam, Cognizant, HCL and Mphasis has helped Mercury reach a wide range of customers.

From point tools to a solution

Going forward, Srinivasan observes, “Software testing is growing faster than it was two years back. The acceptance of performance testing is higher as it cannot be done manually. However, in functional testing, manual methods prevail. When industries move towards regulatory compliance we expect our IT governance solutions to take off.”

Testing was not regarded as an important career in India. That’s all changed now. “Our systems integrators are building software testing teams in thousands. We are seeing companies moving from using point tools to deploying complete solution-integrated sets of software, services and best practices for automating key performance activities. BTO and automated testing are here to stay. However, these have to be fuelled by awareness,” Srinivasan concludes.

vinutha@expresscomputeronline.com