Mercury Interactive has launched Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) Enterprise, claimed to be the first suite to implement an integrated Enterprise BTO technology blueprint.

This is accessed through the Mercury IT Governance Centre, on top of the Mercury Application Change Lifecycle with Mercury Quality Centre, Mercury Performance Centre and Mercury Business Availability Centre underneath it all. And it's all run from a common dashboard.

BTO Enterprise represents the culmination of a $500m investment made over three years in BTO, Mercury says. Customers can buy the underlying technology or rent it as a hosted internet service.

The technology exploits a trend that Mercury identifies as a shift to optimising business outcomes, instead of managing IT outcomes only. The company also offers services to help companies adopt Best Practice and align IT with business goals - optimising quality, lowering costs and minimising risk.

The BTO Enterprise suite is IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) aware, which means that it recognises the accepted Best Practice standards in operational IT management - although it goes beyond ITIL.

Mercury is a leader in BTO. In its case this means testing and software quality assurance, in general, and in the widest sense - including performance testing, for example. This is extended to cover monitoring of operational systems and IT governance. It's a powerful message – you can use analysis scenarios as the basis for test scripts and develop these for operational monitoring, increasing re-use and reducing waste. Mercury claims that 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies rely on its software and services for BTO.

Mercury has lined up a clutch of analysts to hail the launch of BTO Enterprise. This garland is from Thomas Mendel, research director at Forrester, the IT analyst firm:

"Enterprise infrastructure management products are entering an era of major change," he says. "Innovations in change and configuration management promise a more efficient way to manage infrastructures, and Microsoft and Mercury are starting to show real muscle."

Interest in aligning operational IT with the business, whether you call it Business Service Management or Business Technology Optimisation, is growing fast, as the business managers who pay IT bills start thinking about the value they get for their money: IT professionals had better take notice.

Mercury today announced a couple of acquisitions: BeatBox (formerly ClickCadence), which tracks real user application behaviour and m-Test from Intuwave, used for testing Symbian smart phone applications. ®

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