Mercury Interactive Corporation was an Israeli company acquired by the HP Software Division. Mercury offered software for application management, application delivery, change and configuration management, service-oriented architecture, change request, quality assurance, and IT governance.

History

In 1989, Zvi Schpizer, Ilan Kinriech and Arye Finegold founded Mercury Interactive Corporation. The company was based in California and had offices located around the world. It also had a large R&D facility in

Yehud, Israel Yehud () is a city in the Central District (Israel), Central District of Israel that is part of the joint municipality of Yehud-Monosson. In 2007, the city's population stood at approximately 30,000 people (including Neve Monosson – see below). ...

. On 25 July 2006,

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

announced it would pay approximately $4.5 billion to acquire Mercury Interactive. In November, Mercury Interactive formally became part of HP. The Mercury Interactive products are now sold by HP Software Division. Mercury Interactive legacy products were integrated and sold as part of the HP IT Management Software portfolio from the HP Software Division. Most of the Mercury Interactive software assets were apportioned to

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas. It is a business-focused organization which works in servers, storage, networking, containerization software and ...

(HPE) when HP split into two companies. In September 2017, HPE completed the sale of most of its software assets, including the legacy Mercury Interactive products to UK-based

Micro Focus Micro Focus International plc was a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provided software and consultancy. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange and t ...

. In 2023, Canadian software company

OpenText OpenText Corporation (styled as opentext) is a global software company that develops and sells information management software. OpenText, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, is Canada's fourth-largest software company as of 2022, and r ...

acquired Micro Focus, including Mercury Interactive products.

Acquisitions

From 2000 until its HP acquisition in 2006, Mercury purchased several software companies: * Conduct Software Technologies, Inc., acquired by Mercury Interactive in a share-swap deal worth about $50M, was a privately held software company founded in 1996 by Sharon Azulai, David Barzilai, and Ran Levy. The company provided network topology visualization products, to pinpoint bottlenecks and isolate the location of network problems both across the network and across the system infrastructure. Its main product was SiteRunner, which used multi-agent technology to pinpoint bottlenecks. As part of Mercury, Conduct alumni started a new project, nicknamed Falcon and later called Prism, that switched focus to monitoring web server traffic. * Freshwater Software was a software vendor of a web server monitoring and administration tool called SiteScope. Mercury Interactive acquired Freshwater Software in 2001. The product is now called HP SiteScope software. * Performant Inc. was a software vendor of J2EE diagnostic tools. Mercury Interactive acquired Performant in 2003 for $22.5M. * Kintana Inc. was a software vendor of IT governance products. Mercury Interactive acquired Kintana in June 2003 for $225M. Kintana products are now calle
HP Project and Portfolio Management software
* Appilog was a software vendor of auto-discovery and application mapping software. Appilog products mapped the relationships among applications and their underlying infrastructure. Mercury Interactive acquired Appilog for $49M in 2004. Appilog products are now part of HP Universal CMDB software, an HP Business Service Management offering. * BeatBox Technologies (formerly named "ClickCadence LLC") was a software vendor of real user behavior tracking products. Mercury Interactive acquired BeatBox in 2005 for approximately $14 million in cash, "to extend the real user monitoring capabilities of its BTO software and to enhance its performance lifecycle offerings.". BeatBox was incorporated into Mercury's Real User Monitor (RUM) product, which is now part of HP Business Availability Center. * Systinet (formerly named ''IdooX'') was a software

vendor In a supply chain, a vendor, supplier, provider or a seller, is an enterprise that contributes goods or services. Generally, a supply chain vendor manufactures inventory/stock items and sells them to the next link in the chain. Today, these term ...

of registry and enablement products for standard service-oriented

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructi ...

( SOA). Mercury Interactive acquired Systinet in 2006 for $105M. Systinet products are now called HP SOA Systinet software.

Corporate malfeasance

From 4 January 2006 until its acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, Mercury Interactive was traded via the Pink Sheets as a result of being delisted from the NASDAQ due to noncompliance with filing requirements. On 3 January 2006, Mercury missed a second deadline for restating its financials, leading to the delisting. Three top executives resigned in November 2005 after a special committee at the company found that they benefited from a program to favorably price option grants. The committee found that, beginning in 1995, there were 49 instances in which the stated date of a stock option grant was different from the date on which the option appeared to have been granted. In almost every case, the price on the actual date was higher than the price on the stated grant date. A former Chief Financial Officer, Sharlene Abrams, later associated with the financial misreporting, had resigned previously in November 2001. The Chief Executive Officer, Amnon Landan, also was found to have misreported personal stock option exercise dates to increase his profit on transactions three times between 1998 and 2001. In addition, a $1 million loan to Landan in 1999—which was repaid—did not appear to have been approved in advance by the Board of Directors and was referred to in some of the company's public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but was not clearly disclosed. In 2007, the SEC filed civil fraud charges against Landan, Smith, Skaer and Abrams. Without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations, Mercury Interactive agreed to pay a $28 million civil penalty to settle the Commission's charges in 2007. The SEC settled charges against Sharlene Abrams in March 2009. Abrams agreed to pay $2,287,914 in disgorgement, of which $1,498,822 represented the "in-the-money" benefit from her exercise of backdated option grants, and a $425,000 civil penalty. In September 2009, a federal judge dismissed all charges brought by the SEC against Susan Skaer, who now goes by the name Susan Skaer Tanner.Amy Miller. Texas Lawyer. “Ex-GC Alleges McAfee Used Him as 'Shield' to Protect Its CEO, Directors.” Retrieved 2010-02-25.
/ref>

Products

* HP ALM software:

Application lifecycle management Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the product lifecycle management (governance, development, and maintenance) of computer programs. It encompasses requirements management, software architecture, computer programming, software testing, ...

and testing toolset * HP

LoadRunner LoadRunner is a software testing tool from OpenText. It is used to test applications, measuring system behavior and performance under load. LoadRunner can simulate millions of users concurrently using application software, recording and later ...

software: Integrated software performance testing tools * HP QuickTest Professional software: Automated software testing *

HP Quality Center OpenText Quality Center, formerly known as Micro Focus Quality Center and HP Quality Center, is a quality management software offered by OpenText who acquired Micro Focus in 2023. Micro Focus acquired the software division of Hewlett Packard Ent ...

software (formerly HP TestDirector for Quality Center software): Quality management software for applications * HP SiteScope software: Agentless monitoring software * HP Universal CMDB software: Configuration management database * HP Project and Portfolio Management software Project Management module: zero-client software for scheduling and managing software * HP Business Process Testing software: Automated and manual testing software for test design, test creation, test maintenance, test execution, and test data management * HP Diagnostics software: Diagnostic software for applications * HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping software: Automated application and IT infrastructure mapping software * HP Functional Testing software: Automated functional and regression testing software * HP Real User Monitor software: Software that provides real-time visibility into application performance and availability from the user perspective * HP Performance Center: Application performance testing management solutions * HP Business Availability Center: Business service management solutions * HP Mobile Center: mobile application testing solution

Competitors

;Quality Assurance *

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

(acquired

Rational Rationality is the quality of being guided by or based on reason. In this regard, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do, or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. This quality can apply to an ...

) *

(acquired

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was developing and selling software development and software deployment products. B ...

which acquired

Segue A segue ( , ; ) is a transition from one topic or section to the next. In music In music, ''segue'' is a direction to the performer. It means ''continue (the next section) without a pause''. The term ''attacca'' is used synonymously. For writ ...

SilkTest Silk Test is a tool for automated function and regression testing of enterprise applications. It was originally developed by Segue Software which was acquired by Borland in 2006. Borland was acquired by Micro Focus International in 2009 and Micr ...

, SilkPerformer) *

Parasoft Parasoft (officially Parasoft Corporation) is an independent software vendor specializing in automated software testing and application security with headquarters in Monrovia, California. It was founded in 1987 by four graduates of the Californi ...

Tricentis Tricentis is a software testing company founded in 2007 and headquartered in Austin, Texas. It provides software testing automation and software quality assurance products for enterprise software. History Tricentis was founded in 2007 in Vienna, ...

;IT Governance /

ITIL ITIL (previously and also known as Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a framework with a set of practices (previously processes) for IT activities such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) that focus ...

/ ITSM * BMC * CA (acquired Niku) *

Compuware Compuware Corporation was an American software company based in Detroit. The company offered products aimed at the information technology (IT) departments of large businesses, and its services also included testing, development, automation and p ...

(acquired ChangePoint) *

( Tivoli) *

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

( System Center) *

Primavera Systems Primavera Systems, Inc was a private company providing Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software to help project-intensive organizations identify, prioritize, and select project investments and plan, manage, and control projects and project p ...

Quest Software Quest Software, also known as Quest, is a privately held software company headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, United States. Quest provides cloud management, software as a service, security, workforce mobility, and backup & recovery. The co ...

;Monitoring and Diagnostics * BMC (acquired Coradiant) * CA (acquired Wily Technology) *

( System Center)

References

Bibliography

External links

HP IT Management (Business Technology Optimization-BTO) Software website
* ttp://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/mercury-interactive-corporation-history/ Mercury Interactive Corporation History {{OpenText OpenText Defunct software companies of the United States Software companies established in 1989 Hewlett-Packard acquisitions Software companies of Israel Mergers and acquisitions of Israeli companies 2006 mergers and acquisitions Software companies disestablished in 2006