Systinet's Registry product is designed to allow users to publish and manage business services, and its Policy Manager tool is designed to allow enterprises to streamline policy creation and ensure that services meet required polices before going into production. Systinet's 170 customers include Amazon.com Inc., The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. and the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is using Systinet tools across the Defense Department to catalog and manage Web services created by the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy and other agencies.

David Murphy, Mercury's chief financial officer, said there is significant overlap among Systinet's customers and Mercury's customer base.

"[SOA] is a second generation of the kind of applications customers are now building on top of their existing ERP or other legacy systems of record," Murphy said. "Mercury will leverage the Systinet platform to help customers mitigate the risk [of SOA initiatives]. We are now in a position to combine uniquely the SOA registry [with] the ability to manage the Web-service and SOA components through their life cycle and ... then add monitoring."