Mercury takes to Freshwater

NEWS Freshwater sells a package of tactical ebusiness monitoring and management products to around 3,000 customers worldwide, including AOL, Barnesandnoble.com and Merrill Lynch. Mercury Interactive will keep Freshwater as a standalone subsidiary, but sell the company's products alongside its own software offerings. Zohar Gilad, VP and general manager at Mercury Interactive, said: "This deal combines our applications-centric view with their systems-centric view." He added that Boulder, Colorado-based Freshwater, is a profitable company, but declined to divulge the revenues of the privately held firm. In an unrelated announcement, Mercury Interactive also said it has become one of the first nine companies to make its software available to those developing applications for Microsoft's .NET platform. Mercury Interactive is supporting Microsoft Visual Studio.NET - a rapid application development tool for building Web applications and XML Web services - with its family of products, WinRunner, LoadRunner, TestDirector and Topaz.