Systinet Gets Acquired : Surprisingly By Mercury

Mercury, which makes a suite of tools for testing and monitoring business applications, said the acquisition of Systinet will better position the company in the emerging market for service-oriented architecture infrastructure and tools. SOA is a way to design computing systems so that individual programs can be reused and combined with other applications. A service that provides access to customer data can be written once and used in several different applications. Systinet provides a dedicated server, called a registry, for keeping track of a company's catalog of services enabling the administrators to attach policies, such as access rights, on how services can be used. Some may tend to look at Systinet being close to an infrastructural utility. Traditionally seen as close to BEA – this acquisition by the beleaguered Mercury looks a little surprising. May be they wanted to be equidistant with Oracle as well or perhaps Mercury offered the best deal. Systinet products enable, publish, discover and manage SOA business services, and make it easy to build secure and reliable Web services with Java and C++ applications. Systinet products are centered on industry standards such as XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.

Systinet is a fairly well run company and the exit would have given good returns for the promoters. Tom Erickson said more than an year back that, "The motivation is to try to create some real value in the SOA space because we believe that there’s going to be a play, and we’re going to use [Systinet] as kind of the vehicle to achieve that. We believe that there’s an opportunity that when a paradigm shift happens there is an opportunity for a new company to emerge. If you go through time you can see this repeatedly again. There has been a new major player in the software industry appearing when there’s paradigm shifts because some of the older players fail to make the transition, whether it’s in the hardware transition from mainframes to [minicomputers] to micros, whether it’s been software transitions from mainframe to client/server to all along the way. Because [however] Pincus was involved in BEA, they’re the company that funded BEA, they have a similar vision -- [that] we can do this again. Tom Erickson, whom I know for sometime is someone always on the move & he must have ben indeed happy to have brought. Congrats Tom & team. This acquisition makes sense for Mercury and systiner as well - we can expect Mercury help systinet family of products reach large number of enterprises.