The US$105 million, cash-based deal is intended to enable Mercury customers to take a lifecycle-based approach to boosting the quality, performance, and availability of SOA business services, according to Mercury. Systinet's technology will bolster Mercury's " Business Technology Optimization" (BTO) approach to ensuring business outcomes in IT.

"We're very excited about this because we believe this allows us to expand very significantly the definition of BTO into SOA," said Christopher Lochhead, chief marketing officer at Mercury. "Mercury's been doing a bunch of things in SOA for a while, but this is a new level of capability built around this notion of what you might think of as the integrity of SOA applications."

While SOA offers a faster time to market for application services, the large numbers of services generated in an SOA nonetheless introduce new complexities that Mercury hopes to address with its Systinet acquisition, Lochhead said. 

"The ramifications of [these new services] are really a material increase in complexity and the rate of change, which increases business risk as a result of the potential for chaos," he said. The way to "chaos-proof" SOA is by ensuring integrity of how SOA components work together, said Lochhead.

"As we move to SOA by adding Systinet technology, we really become the go-to company for the CIO as well as the architecture group, the operations group for moving to SOA," he said.