Acquisition Could Pull OEM Plug

When Mercury Interactive picked up Systinet for a cool $105 million in cash last month, most industry analysts focused on how good a move it was for Mercury. Purchasing Systinet, a registry/repository provider, will help Mercury's product lines to continue embracing and extending SOA (service-oriented architecture), the reports said.

But the analysts and pundits ignored the acquisition's potential impact on other SOA-based ISV product lines. Nearly every BPM (business process management) and ESB (enterprise service bus) product on the market--including those from BEA Systems and Oracle--interoperates with the Systinet product or its parent company resells it. Systinet is, and has been, entrenched in the SOA arena for about two years. So why aren't analysts talking about the impact this acquisition will have on the wider market?

Maybe it's because right now it looks like the acquisition won't change a thing. Mercury claims it will run Systinet as a "wholly owned subsidiary." But the registry/repository space is a small one, and this acquisition leaves only Infravio and SOA Software as the most well-recognized and independent providers of registry/repository products. Software AG has a product, but it's still new.

I'm guessing Infravio and SOA Software are both licking their chops in anticipation that this acquisition will not be viewed positively by Systinet's OEM partners