Lo noted the company's local clients are mainly major enterprises, including Citibank, Bank of America, HSBC, Towngas, Hospital Authority, Hong Kong Jockey Club and Cathay Pacific.

With increased awareness of IT service management and ITIL, Mercury Interactive expects its Business Availability Center to be a "rising star" in its product portfolio, said Darryl Dickens, senior director of marketing and communications, Asia Pacific.

The Business Availability Center mainly provides management and monitoring of application performance, quality and availability to ensure business service continuity. Different from most application management software, Dickens noted Mercury Interactive takes a top-down business perspective in managing applications.

"We monitor applications and provide alerts based on business metrics and SLAs," he said. "That's different from other providers, who monitor applications from an infrastructure perspective."To further enhance its offering in IT service management, Mercury Interactive has also recently acquired service desk technology provider Vertical Solutions and software development house Tefensoft with an aggregate purchase price of US$18.5 million.

Dickens said Vertical Solutions expects to expand Mercury Interactive's offering in its business availability center to provide ITIL-based capabilities including incident management, problem resolution, configuration management, change management and release management. Meanwhile Tefensoft is expected to advance the company's R&D effort to achieve its BTO strategy.