The Hindu Business Line : Overseas centres on Mercury's radar

MERCURY Interactive Corporation, the $500 million US-based firm that provides automated software testing solutions, is exploring the option of having development centres in India, China and in Eastern Europe.

"This plan has been in our mind for some time, and we are thinking seriously about it," Mr Zohar Gilad, Vice-President, Strategy, Mercury Interactive, told Business Line.

Mercury has around 15 employees in India, and works mainly through system integrators, including Infosys, Wipro and Satyam. Sonata is its distributor in India.

According to Mr Gilad, who is responsible for developing Mercury's portfolio for future opportunities and initiatives, the company has research and development centres at Tel Aviv (Israel), Silicon Valley, Colorado and Seattle in the US.

"We are now seriously looking at various countries for more centres," he said.

For Mercury, revenue from Asia-Pacific was growing at around 45 per cent a year, and the fastest growth in the region came from India and China. "India is an important market for Mercury, and we are giving a lot of attention to develop business in this country," he said. Over 150 clients in India use Mercury's software testing solutions, he said.

As part of its strategy to expand the application delivery market worldwide and meet the demand of the fast-growing markets such as India and China, Mercury released downloadable (on the Net) Mercury LoadRunner 8.0 in August.

More than 6,500 quality and performance assurance professionals around the globe downloaded the application in the first month of availability. Fifty one per cent of the total number of downloads originated from India and China alone.

India accounted for over one-third of all global downloads in this period, he said. "This shows the acceptance level of our product in the country," he said.

Along with India's cost advantage, global customers are emphasising on quality of products and solutions from Indian vendors. It is here that software testing plays an important role for Indian companies, such as Infosys, Wirpo, Satyam and HCL Infosystems who integrate Mercury's automated testing products with their offerings for clients, he said.

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