Mercury bullish on India

Nasdaq-listed Mercury Interactive Corporation sees strong growth momentum in India for its business technology optimisation (BTO) products and services as more companies in the country are looking at aligning information technology with overall business strategy.

"We see good growth potential in India and expects high growth in our customer base in the country. Along with China, India is a key growth market for Mercury in Asia Pacific," Mukand Mohan, Director of Products, Mercury told Business Standard.

Explaining in detail on the key factors that drove the companies to go for optimisation, he pointed out that though the cost was a primary reason, it was becoming more of a resource measure. Companies are keen to optimise their people and processes to achieve efficiency, he added.

The other key factor was the return on investments. Companies have started checking whether their investments in IT are giving better profits and returns, he said.

Compliance was also another big driver for some companies to go in for optimisation. Companies feel that mitigating risk was as much powerful value proposition as cutting costs, he added.

"IT has to fit into the overall business strategy and the overall plan should be consistent in optimising what you have," he said.

Mercury sees business potential from Tier-1 IT firms and companies in different industry verticals like banking and insurance, telecom, manufacturing, pharma and healthcare and also the government. Today, it has about 500 customers in all these verticals in India.

By partnering with Tier-1 companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS, Mercury has reached a wide range of customers and these partnerships will continue to play a vital role in increasing its client base and business, he added.

Mohan said Mercury's application management solutions would enable companies to manage their applications more efficiently and do monitoring at one third of the cost. At present, application management contributes 70 per cent to the total revenue and software quality testing contributes 30 per cent.

He said that the key differentiating factors of Mercury were less deployment time, end-user management and application mapping.

Mercury's BTO offerings focus on maximising and demonstrating the business value of IT, aligning IT strategy with business priorities, reducing reduce IT spending and controlling risk and improving regulatory compliance. Its service offerings include consulting services, managed services, training services and customer support.

Founded in 1989, Mercury Interactive's global revenue is close to $1 billion and has operations in over than 35 countries. Bangalore is the headquarters for India operations, which commenced in 2002.