Mercury Interactive is buying into SOA with the $105m cash acquisition of privately held Systinet.

The application performance and tuning specialist says the deal will help it enable customers to "take a lifecycle approach to optimizing the quality, performance and availability of SOA business services".

Systinet offers the SystinetRegistry to organize, manage, discover and publish re-usable business services and other service-oriented architecture (SOA) assets. The company also offers the SystinetPolicyManager for creation and management of policies to manage services.

But Systinet's competitor, Infravio, poured cold water on the deal's potential to help Mercury. Miko Matsumura, Infravio's vice-president of technology standards, said his company had beaten Systinet in 16 head-to-head customer bids and replaced Systinet in a second customer account during the last quarter.

He said the deal left the field open for partnerships between Infravio and major platform companies making a name in SOA, such as BEA Systems, IBM and Oracle. "Infravio now has huge OEM partner opportunities," Matsumura said.

Mercury was delisted by NASDAQ last week in the wake of a share allocation scandal. ®

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