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by Anand M.
Original Post: HP Takes over Mercury
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The news of HP taking over Mercury is all over the web now. In an article in SDtimes, Alan Zeichick talks about how the press statement does not mention the testing and QA tools that made Mercury so famous in the first place. I agree and knowing that so many people use these tools am not sure how it is going to affect the software testing market.
One of my recent projects included looking at tools to perform LoadTesting on .NET web applications. We had LoadRunner, but were also looking for cheaper alternatives. We spent around two weeks looking around, but still could not find an comprehensive tool to replace LR. There seems to be a recent explosion in load testing tools market with a lot of entrants. Though most of these are good and cheap, none of them have the feature coverage that LR has. Ofcourse, if HP does not continue improving LR, these tools will slowly, but surely, move up to fill the gap.
The current customers and partners of Mercury, who have invested a lot of money into the testing and QA tools will surely be worried about this.
> <p>The current customers and partners of Mercury, who have > invested a lot of money into the testing and QA tools will > surely be worried about this.</p>
Those of us who used Rational's Visual Test have already suffered this scenario thanks to IBM. VT was a lower-cost alternative to Rational's more expensive testing tools. IBM won't even let you buy a license for it.
I consider this exhibit A in making the case that IBM is an OSS poser. If they really believed in Open Source they would let VT users have the source code so they could continue to use it and update it.
IBM's "commitment" to OSS ends where their profits begin. I don't think there's anything wrong with IBM making a business decision in favor of profit, I just don't like the phony endorsement of OSS.
I just signed up with Artima Developer Network and found you are into a .NET project and are looking at a cheaper alternative against LoadRunner.
Please let me know if your application is a web based application as I would be happy to suggest you a solution which could certainly help you out in Load & Performance Testing.
For Enterprise based applications Mercury certainly stands on the top followed by Compuware & Segue.
You can also reach me at nittin.mehta@gmail.com. Maybe I could contribute towards your queries.
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