“Organisations want to get the best out of their existing IT infrastructure”

Christopher Lochhead, chief marketing officer, Mercury Interactive Corporation talks to Abhinav Singh about how Business Technology Optimisation can help businesses get additional mileage from their existing IT infrastructure

* What benefits can businesses derive by adopting Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) to increase IT utilisation and contain costs?

BTO has assumed immense significance for organisations the world over as most of them are now looking at optimising the utilisation rate of their existing Information Technology (IT) resources rather than investing in new ones. BTO is a mix of business and quality management practices, coupled with software and services aligned with the IT strategy of an organisation to meet its business goals. It takes a best practices approach to optimise application performance and to improve service levels in order to maximise business results. This approach helps companies derive greater business value from IT while reducing cost and controlling risks. All this is being done in order to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their IT infrastructure.

* Are a large number of organisations adopting BTO in a big way?

During the dotcom boom a large number of organisations across the world invested heavily in IT. This investment [in IT drastically] dried up after the dotcom crash that was followed by a recession. In the recent past IT investments have grown marginally in the US and Europe. It is only in China and India that we are seeing an upward trend in IT spending. Organisations want to get the best out of their existing IT infrastructure—hence the importance of BTO. We have seen that in the recent times global companies are increasingly focusing on aligning IT and their business strategy while optimising the quality, performance and business availability of strategic software applications.

* What is the relevance of BTO in software development?

BTO can be extensively used by organisations right from the development of the software to the post deployment stage. During the software development process BTO tools can play an effective role in testing the application responsible for software development. BTO tools help underline any errors in the application, thereby resulting in better quality software being developed. Once the software is deployed BTO tools can help in better management of the software ensuring its optimum utilisation. BTO tools can also help an organisation get clear visibility of their software projects, as they have the capability to pinpoint any loopholes during different stages of the project.

* Which industry verticals are using BTO extensively?

BTO is being used largely in financial services, telecom and software development. In the financial sector most of the large banks, stock exchanges and brokerage firms have leveraged the power of BTO. We have the Bank of America and the Abbey National Bank as some of our major customers in the financial sector. In the telecom field we have customers like China Mobile, Telstra, Orange in the UK and AT&T wireless. Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, Accenture are some of our customers on the software side.

* Do you plan to have a development centre in India?

India has been a key market for us due to the mushrooming of software development centres. In the past two years we have signed up 150 customers mainly in software services including Wipro Technologies, Infosys Technologies, Satyam and HCL Technologies. Many of our global customers who have operations in India are using our BTO solutions here. We sell through system integrators. As per our current strategy we plan to expand our customer base in India and do not foresee any development centre coming up in India for the time being.

* What are the key technologies being used in your products? Where do you conduct R&D?

We invested close to $ 60 million for R&D last year. We have development centres in the Silicon Valley, Seattle and Denver in the United States and at Tel Aviv in Israel. We build our products using J2EE, Visual Basic and C++. Our products support Linux, Unix and .NET. We are in partnership with SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft and have pre packaged scripts which our customers can use in different application scenarios and leverage the power of BTO.