HP Buys Mercury - Relevant to SOA. But Not to SOA Testers?

The purchase of Mercury by HP is big news for SOA and the software industry in general. But what impact will it have on the overall market for software quality solutions? It's time for someone to say "Mercury is not a testing company." Mercury was no longer leading in testing anyway - though it was originally their bread and butter, two things happened over the last 3 years: One, larger enterprises started moving more of their business logic than ever to middle tiers like web services, messaging and databases. The tools Mercury built focused largely on the user interface, and that kind of screen-level testing was obsolete in an SOA world. However at the same time, they did respond to SOA by focusing more on overall IT process management or "governance" than testing. With acquisitions like Systinet and Appilog, they moved toward coordinating some SOA activities and application architectures at a policy level, but they were never able to actually test SOA. It is not that easy to change course that fast when your existing tools are actually based on where the user's cursor is clicking on the screen. So for Mercury to get bought by HP makes a lot of sense now as HP wants to be a leading managed services vendor. In terms of testing dominance, Mercury was the 800-pound gorilla. But as technology moved, they started looking more like a big gorilla suit, as the tools didn't keep up. So what will happen to their testing customers now? Can anyone name a dominant HP software product? The only product with any swing is OpenView but it's 3rd to Tivoli and Unicenter. They buy software companies just like CA acquires them, but please, has HP ever built synergy between software vendors even at that level? Strange how the purchase of a $25M company positions Mercury for a $4.5 billion purchase a few months later. Seems rather generous for a company that was on the slide with complete management turnover. Somehow the word on Systinet as the keystone of SOA created this sudden urgency. HP will look at the software testing part of Mercury and say "who cares, we are a managed services company." Which is all fine. "Governance" is an SOA item that is in demand. But who will stick around to actually make sure these SOA applications actually work as they continually evolve and change? Exciting times indeed.