Recently HP bought Mercury for 4.5 Billion $....Infoworld tries to understand the reason why?

Adaptive. Enterprise
long-standing HP initiative purports to link IT assets directly to business value. Until now, HP could only make this connection at the network and systems level with OpenView. With Mercury's software, it adds hooks into application monitoring and portfolio management, which are key technologies for enterprises that want to tie technology resource allocation to business outcomes.

Adaptive Enterprise and Mercury's BTO (Business Technology Optimization) initiatives are different sides of the same coin. HP handles management and monitoring of systems and network assets. Mercury engages in parallel efforts with software. "We already have customers who have integrated the OpenView and Mercury dashboards," he notes

Access to CIO's
"It gives us access at a strategic level to the CIO. Instead of being viewed as a killer server company and a killer printer company, now we're engaged at the CIO level to talk about running his organization as a business and optimizing business outcomes," Thomas Hogan, HP's senior vice president of software says.

Concern Points:
No current vision on Mercury's strong pre-deployment application QA testing product suite, HP will need to about the testing market

HP's capability with handling the software biz at any level higher than OpenView.HP has a long line of software fiascos including the failure to capitalize on its eSpeak Web services innovations, the squandering of Bluestone middleware and its excellent app server technology.

Though in a last week CEO Mark Hurd told analysts that software can be one of HP's "crown jewels."

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai