For now, the company is talking about its messaging and branding plans, holding off more substantive product roadmaps for at least five or six more weeks.

There is little product overlap between the companies, and there will be few if any layoffs.

This is not a case of acquire and strip, said David Gee, vice president of marketing for HP, adding that at least eight top Mercury executives have elected to stay on.

And it still holds to earlier predictions that the deal will drive 10% to 15% revenue growth in HP’s software business, with margins of roughly 20% in fiscal 2008.

The other highlight is that Mercury’s Business Technology Optimization (BTO) category branding will be retained and extended to cover the HP OpenView family as well, with an ad campaign slated to start this week.

Everything that you’ll see us do, from a packaging and presence will reflect how does this optimize business outcome, said Gee.

To some extent that’s not surprising, given that BTO has become pretty well identified with Mercury’s IT governance products. And, were HP to drop the moniker, it would give off the wrong signals, making the company sound too much like its techie roots.

Nonetheless, there is good potential for confusion with HP’s existing Adaptive Enterprise corporate strategy, which is not going away anytime soon. Giving a bit of a labored explanation, HP’s Gee characterized Adaptive Enterprise as the strategy for aligning IT with the organization to enable agility, while BTO becomes the way adaptive is implemented through management software.

While the brand names of Mercury’s products (such as LoadRunner) will survive, not surprisingly, the Mercury name will be replaced by HP. By contrast, the Systinet name will be retained on the registry product, which will be called HP Systinet Registry.

While HP emphasized that it intended to retain as much of Mercury’s organization as possible, it did not specify what the new org chart would look like.

Like a Russian doll, HP will eventually get around to finishing the absorption of Systinet. That’s the company that Mercury itself acquired after disclosure of the executive options scandals, but before the point where HP entered the picture.

Under Mercury’s watch, Systinet remained autonomous and retained its corporate name. Partly that was attributable to Systinet’s brand recognition in the emerging UDDI registry segment. But it was also due to the fact that, obviously, Mercury was pretty distracted at the time.

Mercury is the latest of a string of acquisitions bulking up HP Software over the past three years. Gee termed it one of the simplest because, although it was large, there was little if any overlap.

The fact that HP still has a software business is no small miracle because, until the past three years, it had no focus and was almost killed off by neglect. The epitome was its 2002 acquisition of Bluestone for an ill-fated foray into the Java middleware space.

But having invented network node management, HP was unable to zero out OpenView because it had too much of an installed base. In the past three years it has refocused in a track similar to CA’s by emphasizing IT management software.

It’s made a string of acquisitions that have ranged from taking a portion of Baltimore Technologies (for identity management) to swallowing large entities like Peregrine (like Mercury, another troubled company with a large installed base).

Being in a quiet period, HP couldn’t give numbers or magnitudes to describe how well Peregrine or similar acquisitions have been faring. But a couple quarters back, it reported overall software numbers up 34% over a year earlier. But in the grand scheme of things at HP, the software group remains pretty small potatoes, accounting for barely 1% of overall revenues.

HP will disclose the product roadmap for Mercury offerings at its European Software Universe conference in Vienna on December 12.