On June 13, Mercury Interactive announced that it is expanding its reach into the IT services management market. The company is tackling the service desk and has acquired PowerHelp IT software from Vertical Solutions Inc. and Tefensoft, as well as all of Tefensoft's R&D staff and facilities. VSI and Tefensoft worked together to create PowerHelp IT, a product built from the ground up to be compliant with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library best practices model for service management.

The acquisition follows other key Mercury purchases of application discovery vendor Appilog in 2004 and IT governance software maker Kintana in 2003. Mercury has integrated products from the Appilog and Kintana acquisitions to create a configuration management database (CMDB), change management capabilities, and workflow processes and has brought them into the mainstream of other Mercury technologies in support of ITSM positioning.

Prior to the VSI/Tefensoft acquisition, Mercury found itself immersed in the help desk market as its customers adapted Mercury's IT governance and change management technologies to meet their problem and incident management needs. Still, Mercury felt the market pressure to offer a full-fledged service desk - one that integrates with the entire range of ITIL-infused service models, including change management, service-level management (SLM) and the CMDB.

PowerHelp IT software will be incorporated into Mercury Service Desk and provide a link across Mercury's existing portfolio, bridging the divide that currently exists between application development and deployment and operations. This builds on Mercury's core strengths of supporting application development, testing and deployment - a differentiator in the service desk space that most competitors do not possess.

Mercury's strategy is to tightly integrate the service desk with Mercury Business Availability Center, Mercury Change Control Management, Mercury IT Governance Center, Mercury Quality Center, and the Mercury Application Mapping. The CMDB is at the heart of these solutions and will serve as a centerpiece for the service desk integration.

The VSI/Tefensoft solution was built from the ground up around ITIL best practices. Many competitive service desk solutions today offer retrofitted ITIL capabilities primarily because their established product sets preceded the global trend to adopt ITIL best practices. This creates challenges such as increased cost for development and "less than seamless" features and functions. However, VSI/Tefensoft was not alone in this endeavor. There are a few other examples of service desk products built around ITIL, including Touchpaper and Axios Systems. The challenge for these smaller companies is that the service desk market is crowded and gaining visibility among the fray is a difficult challenge on limited marketing budgets. Mercury has the brand recognition and marketing dollars to make this a reality.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.