Quoting from DataMonitor/ComputerWire
Surgient Inc has responded to VMware’s acquisition of rival Akimbi with an endorsement and preliminary tie-in to Mercury Interactive Corp’s Test Director.
The hubbub centers on a newly competitive market in virtual test lab automation. In English, that means being able to take snapshots or virtual images of the environment that you test or deploy software to, so that when you test the next software build, you can test on exactly the same environment.
Mercury has certified Surgient’s VQMS (Virtual Quality Management System) against Mercury Test Director and has agreed to provide references so Surgient can sell directly into Mercury accounts (the agreement does not cover reselling however). Surgient says that it has recently performed the integration at a Fortune 100 customer.
The two products are linked but not fully integrated. It runs with an adapter from Mercury to Surgient that enables you to launch VQMS while in Quality Center.
However, data is not integrated, so the test cases do not at this point carry data regarding the virtual test lab environment images maintained by Surgient. According to Bill Daniel, that may be an area of further integration in the future.
Surgient is older than the recently acquired Akimbi, and claims its business was about 10 times larger. Of course, that also includes its original products, which focused more on managing configurations of demo environments for ISVs, and hands-on training for corporate clients in general. But test lab automation is likely to become the mainstay of the business.
Naturally, the claims also add a few digs, such as the fact that EMC itself is one of Surgient’s largest demo customers, using the product for its storage management and Documentum units.
For now, Surgient's relationship with Mercury is one of certification and referrals. However, as test lab automation is a natural extension of test management, we’d be surprised if Mercury or some other testing vendor doesn't at some point make a more formal bid to acquire the technology.
The original article can be found, here.