Both companies will jointly market and selling the combined products. The announcement was made at Peregrine’s annual user conference, being held this week in Las Vegas.
With the links, customers could use Mercury’s application mapping, which correlates software applications with the servers and databases on which they run, with Peregrine’s ServiceCenter to prioritize and manage change requests.
Similarly, Mercury’s Business Availability Center, which provides a high-level dashboard on whether processes such as order fulfillment, are running with the Peregrine ServiceCenter tools to report compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
It could also be used by help desk personnel to not only see the problem, but also view performance history and where the application is deployed. By adding context to the problem, a support technician could more readily spot where the problem is occurring and make better educated guesses on how to resolve it.
Additionally, the impact of proposed fixes or changes to application deployment could be simulated, using Mercury’s testing tools that test the performance of actual or simulated software configurations under varying demand patterns to gauge its impact on the business.
For instance, if a sudden rush of orders arrives, the linked systems could test the impact of shifting a server resource from processing invoices to processing orders to determine whether the proposed change would solve the problem and/or create any negative side effects.
The Mercury and Peregrine systems would share data by establishing a federated configuration management database that would, in essence, have pointers to data in each other’s systems.
In piecing together the links, both are using the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, which provides a glossary and taxonomy for classifying the services that IT organizations deliver, for delivering reporting. Developed for the UK government, ITIL has become a de facto standard that is being used by most vendors providing IT governance solutions.
Both of us are integrating our dashboards so we can use each other’s data, said Christopher Lochhead, Mercury’s chief marketing officer. You’ll get the data from Mercury’s Optimization Centers as opposed to inventing your own knowledge base and conducting ‘fix and hope’, said Lochhead.
