Mercury Interactive, whose software helps organizations align IT projects with business goals, plans to acquire Systinet, a provider of service-oriented architecture software and services.

Mercury Interactive signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Systinet for $105 million in cash, with the hopes that the deal will boost its position in the fast-growing SOA software and services market, Mercury Interactive said Monday.

The IT project alignment company specializes in what it calls business technology optimization (BTO) software, designed to let organizations calibrate their IT initiatives so that they support business activities. Systinet, on the other hand, focuses on software and services for SOAs, infrastructures that enable distributed enterprise applications to communicate and interoperate.

The combination of the companies' products "will make it easier for our combined customers to manage SOA business services and optimize the quality, performance and availability of SOA applications," said Tony Zingale, Mercury Interactive's CEO, during a conference call Monday to discuss the planned acquisition.

SOAs hold great promise to lower the cost of application development, integration and maintenance, and to make IT departments more agile and responsive, Zingale said.

However, it has also become apparent that SOAs increase technical complexity and business risk, as organizations move from having a relatively small number of large applications to having a large number of small reusable application components, also known as services, he said.

Systinet helps address these issues, with software products that let organizations keep a record of application components and maintain control over them, he said.

For example, Systinet makes a registry product for organizing, managing, discovering and publishing reusable application components. It also has the Systinet Policy Manager, for creating and enforcing policies that govern how SOA components interact, he said.

The acquisition is expected to close during this quarter, pending customary closing and regulatory conditions.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.