SAP has been reselling Mercury’s LoadRunner testing software in the US since last December. Mercury’s Wayne Cook, VP alliances EMEA, told us that relationship has led to six new customers for Mercury already, with some of those deals in six figures.
In deals where SAP has sold the Mercury software, SAP’s own staff offer the first line of LoadRunner-related support to customers, which Cook said resolves 90% of customer support requests. The remaining 10% are automatically redirected to Mercury’s support team.
Mercury said that when sold via SAP, the product is branded SAP LoadRunner by Mercury, and it’s available from SAP from today. According to Mercury, the software validates the performance and optimizing capabilities of SAP’s ERP and NetWeaver platforms.
LoadRunner also enables customers to verify that SAP applications will meet business performance requirements before they go live in implementation deployments. After deployment, Mercury then offers what it calls Business Availability Center for SAP for application monitoring and diagnostics. A new version of that product, 6.1, is due for release tomorrow. That product is not included in the SAP reseller deal, however.
In that particular space, SAP has a product of its own, SAP Solution Manager. SAP describes the product as a centralized solution management platform that provides the tools, the integrated content, and the gateway to SAP that you need to implement, support, operate, and monitor your SAP solutions.
However, Mercury’s Cook said that, [While] there are definitely some overlaps… we try and minimize those and in fact we can integrate with SAP Solution Manager.
SAP’s Michael Kleinemeier, managing director EMEA central, said: We recognize Mercury’s expertise in helping to standardize the quality process with application delivery offerings that enhance the performance and efficiency of our customers’ business processes.
