Mercury buys registry maker Systinet

Mercury Interactive said Monday it will pay $105 million for privately held registry-software company Systinet.

Mercury, which makes a suite of tools for testing and monitoring business applications, said the acquisition will better position the company in the emerging market for service-oriented architecture infrastructure and tools.

A service-oriented architecture, or SOA, is a way to design computing systems so that individual programs can be reused and combined with other applications. For example, a service that provides access to customer data can be written once and used in several different applications.

Systinet provides a dedicated server, called a registry, for keeping track of a company's catalog of services. It enables administrators to attach policies, such as access rights, on how services can be used.

Mercury CEO Tony Zingale said Systinet's products will work with Mercury's existing "business technology optimization" (BTO) tools for codifying companies' IT processes.

"Systinet's technology and deep expertise in SOA, combined with Mercury's strong BTO market leadership, introduces powerful product synergies and the ability to address a broader set of customer opportunities in the fast-growing SOA market," Zingale said.

Systinet, founded in 2000, is one of a handful of specialized registry companies. In September, it signed a reseller agreement with Oracle that includes Systinet's software in Oracle's back-end middleware suite.

The purchase of Systinet is expected to be completed in the first quarter.

Mercury's stock was delisted from the Nasdaq last week because it did not meet a deadline for refiling financial statements. The delisting follows a stock option probe late last year, which led to the resignation of its former CEO, Amnon Landan.