Many enterprise HP customers did not move to the new technologies with any urgency, and therefore continued to have a business need for Mercury’s powerful tools. HP still uses the Mercury technology in all sorts of places. None of this is to say that the acquisition was not a success by its own lights. I was part of that diaspora, so I can’t talk about the quality of their replacements, but there was certainly a discontinuity, and the Mercury tools never recovered their previous dominance. As often happens in such cases, much of the original talent left, creating a flourishing “alumni" network.
Mercury winrunner price software#
The Mercury products languished in the Software group, which itself represented only around 2% of HP revenues. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened under HP stewardship. After all, Mercury was fully aware of web applications, offering services that would simulate user access from locations around the world to have a continuous view on sites’ performance as experienced around the world. Given its singular focus on testing, and based on what I know of the company culture pre-acquisition, I am quite certain that an independent Mercury would have addressed the challenge head on and remade itself for that new world. Mercury’s powerful and extremely customisable products were arguably overkill for simpler web applications, and a new generation of tools was beginning to emerge that was dedicated for that purpose. In the case of HP and Mercury, the slow-down was particularly unfortunate because the acquisition came just as enterprise application development was moving from proprietary protocols and GUIs to web applications talking HTTP. There is often a honeymoon period, where increased funding enables delivery of long-awaited functionality, but the releases after that get hollowed out into maintenance releases, and even those start coming further and further apart, frustrating customers and insiders alike. This is unfortunately a pattern with technology acquisitions. Despite some big talk and high expectations, I think it is fair to say that the Mercury products languished within HP - or at the very least failed to evolve with any urgency.
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What happened after that is fairly typical of such acquisitions. It was fascinating to hear the inside account of what happened during that tumultuous time. Dr Yaron was on the board of Mercury at the time, while Chris himself was the CMO there. UPDATE: Christopher Lochhead interviewed Dr Giora Yaron on his excellent Legends & Losers podcast about this history. As its founder was exiled and the stock price cratered, HP swooped in and bought up the whole shop in a fire sale. In 2006, Mercury was trying to bridge that difficult chasm from $1B to $2B in revenue, but was caught up in a wider stock option backdating scandal. I worked on the functional test products, but because of language coverage, I had at least basic familiarity with the whole product set. LoadRunner in particular was the default standard at the time, dominating its market segment. turn it into a little programme that you can replay, so that you can select different menu options and make sure that they all work, or simulate ten thousand users all hitting the app simultaneously and make sure it doesn’t fall down, or whatever. Its products covered functional testing (XRunner, WinRunner, QuickTest Professional), load testing (LoadRunner), and test management (TestDirector, later renamed to Qualit圜enter).īasically what these tools let you do is to record a user interacting with an application, and then parameterise the recording - i.e.
![mercury winrunner price mercury winrunner price](https://applicationfastpower.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/4/0/124045623/516434326.jpeg)
To recap, Mercury (née Mercury Interactive) was a leader in automated software testing. I am especially interested in one of these, namely Mercury, because I worked there for several years.
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One interesting story is that HP Enterprise, or HPE - one of the units that old HP split itself into - is looking into selling off some of its software assets. The shift to the cloud is causing massive disruption, with storied old names struggling to reinvent themselves, and scrappy startups taking over the world. This is an interesting time in the enterprise software market.