Mercury today announced the acquisition of Systinet. Similarly to HP’s acquisition of Talking Blocks two years ago, this move outlines the convergence of SOA and IT services management. What I find interesting in this acquisition is that it follows Mercury’s earlier acquisition of Kintana, a BPM company specialized in the management of ITIL processes. When you put BPM and SOA together with IT services management, you get what Mercury calls Business Technology Optimization (BTO), which is to the CIO what Business Performance Management — the other BPM — might be to the CEO or the CFO.

This brings the following question: should companies deploy both BPM and BTO solutions, or could BPM and BTO capabilities be offered by the same infrastructure through multiple user views? I tend to favor the later option, but I am sure that Mercury and more traditional IT services management vendors such as CA/Unicenter, HP/OpenView and IBM/Tivoli will beg to differ. It will be interesting to see how IBM, which owns both WebSphere (BPM) and Tivoli (BTO), will address this challenge.

And congratulations to Roman Stanek for a second successful venture.