* Ramifications of partnership between Peregrine and Mercury
Last month, Mercury Interactive and Peregrine Systems formed a partnership to focus on synergies among the companies’ change management, asset management, and IT governance software. Of course, there is the question of the service desk – how will the dynamic work among Mercury, Peregrine and IBM?
Only time will tell, but here are some thoughts to ponder.
While there are innumerable lesser-known service and help desk products on the market, the leading offerings have long been those from HP, Computer Associates, Remedy, and Peregrine. (One other product that steps out of the pack is FrontRange, though the company has not focused on the large enterprise.)
There is a lot to be said for the relationship between Mercury and Peregrine. Both companies are making significant investments to integrate products. Peregrine will resell Mercury’s Application Mapping technology directly. Other product sales will be handled as reference sales with all support remaining with the provider of the technology.
Even though the service desk is not the central theme in the partnership announcement, there are reasons to pay attention to this aspect of it. The primary reason is that the service desk is becoming more and more important, in large part due to increased interest in process models in general and the IT Infrastructure Library in particular. Incident and problem management is a good starting point for many large enterprises that are adopting ITIL.
In addition, the service desk is used not solely for events and failures – especially at the high-end of the market where products are highly customizable and often have multiple purposes. Enterprise Management Associates has seen products that track incidents and problems, initiate service requests and new user facilities, track asset changes, perform change management, and on the business side may track customer satisfaction activities in addition to specific problems. Inherently, this all goes back to the configuration management database, with a service desk front-ending it.
You might be asking, what about IBM? Peregrine’s ServiceCenter fills the service desk need for both IBM and Mercury. IBM, in fact, owned the ServiceCenter technology at one point and then sold it to Peregrine. Both Mercury and IBM also work with other service desk products and have an open strategy.
However, from a competitive standpoint, Peregrine’s is the cleaner product. IBM also continues to have a close relationship with Peregrine and in fact announced further efforts to work together at about the same time as the Mercury announcement.
The key question to consider is what would happen if either Mercury or IBM should choose to pursue an acquisition of Peregrine. Perhaps this is an opportunity for a shake-up in the service desk market – a small but clear opening for a vendor such as FrontRange or Axios Systems (a broad provider of an ITIL-based service desk software) to take on a more prominent role. Clearly, there is not enough competition at the high end of the service desk market, and there are innovators that could step up to the plate.
Will Peregrine be absorbed into Mercury? Or maybe IBM? Perhaps it will stand alone and these relationships will help it grow and become more prosperous. Again, only time will tell. In the meantime, it will be interesting to watch this unfold and to see just which service desk products are able to take advantage of this rare opportunity.
