BTO player eyes systems management opportunities Mercury Interactive unveils a raft of new components for its business technology optimization suite this week. MI designed these additions to improve enterprise application and infrastructure performance.The company is aligning itself in the systems management market with four new software components called Optimization Centers: IT Governance, Application Delivery, Performance Center, and Business Availability Center. Each incorporates software, services, and best practices enhancements.In IT Governance, MI has produced a new module for portfolio management that gives CIOs a view to projects and resources. “It will allow a CIO to do unlimited ‘what if’ scenarios. If a project is off schedule, the CIO can move resources and see its impact,” said Christopher Lochead, chief marketing officer at MI. Application Delivery creates a permanent audit trail for tracking changes, especially in financial systems.A capacity planning module in Performance Center forecasts bandwidth and infrastructure capacity needed before an application is rolled out.The Business Availability Center module, for production applications, allows managers to measure business processes to insure that the application and the infrastructure are delivering the level of availability and functionality needed. With $1.2 billion in cash, the company is moving to attack nontraditional competitors, according to John Bruggeman, vice president of marketing at MI. “We’re seeing dollars move away from systems management and move to us,” Bruggeman said.The Mercury Interactive roadmap is part of its business optimization strategy, according to one industry analyst. “Mercury Interactive is taking more of a holistic approach. They want to play a central role in making applications perform better at less cost,” said Dan Gardner, senior analyst at the Yankee Group. Software Development