Goodbye Mercury.......... Hello HP
Submitted by Erik Petersen on Mon, 18/12/2006 - 02:59.
test tools | this.site
So what was Mercury Interactive that then became Mercury is now to be rebranded HP. Apparently, this is on the basis of the IT industry being more familiar with HP than Mercury. I guess that's true in general, but not in the testing tool space. Even IBM has preserved the Rational name, but Rational had ditched the SQA name when they bought TeamTest. So that great Mercury bull-grabbed-by-the-horns t-shirt from STARwest in October is the last one in a long line of Mercury images.... Guess I could save it for eBay, but it’s too good an image not to wear! (Mind you, I could probably put my old SQA TeamTest t-shirt up on ebay now!)
I have bottle openers that mark the changing face of Mercury, the black one with the silver planet and satellite (and a annoying run in with customs, when it had slid under the base of a rucksack and the x-ray guy said there was an opener in my bag, but another customs guy and I couldn’t find it!), and the gray one with the red chunky Mercury, and now one presumes another color change to a blue and white HP.
In terms of product offering, all the test tools will stay, just rebadged under the HP name. That’s what I've heard off the record, but I wonder if a product rationalization could see the demise of WinRunner (which has already been positioned as a legacy product)?
One true differentiator for Mercury has now been lost, the fact that they were focussed on test tools with no side businesses. While this had been changing with their new BTO offerings, it will be interesting to see how much focus the products receive beside the medical devices, printers, hardware and systems software that HP sell now.
Now that open source tools are becoming so widespread and powerful, it is a key time in the history of Mercury-HP so I hope they stay on top of their game...... I wonder if this will impact any of their alliances with other vendors, e.g SAP, Oracle, etc? I guess we just need to watch this space....
I have bottle openers that mark the changing face of Mercury, the black one with the silver planet and satellite (and a annoying run in with customs, when it had slid under the base of a rucksack and the x-ray guy said there was an opener in my bag, but another customs guy and I couldn’t find it!), and the gray one with the red chunky Mercury, and now one presumes another color change to a blue and white HP.
In terms of product offering, all the test tools will stay, just rebadged under the HP name. That’s what I've heard off the record, but I wonder if a product rationalization could see the demise of WinRunner (which has already been positioned as a legacy product)?
One true differentiator for Mercury has now been lost, the fact that they were focussed on test tools with no side businesses. While this had been changing with their new BTO offerings, it will be interesting to see how much focus the products receive beside the medical devices, printers, hardware and systems software that HP sell now.
Now that open source tools are becoming so widespread and powerful, it is a key time in the history of Mercury-HP so I hope they stay on top of their game...... I wonder if this will impact any of their alliances with other vendors, e.g SAP, Oracle, etc? I guess we just need to watch this space....