14 VENDORS JOIN MERCURY'S BENCHMARK ALLIANCE PROGRAM.

Mercury Interactive Corporation (Nasdaq:MERQ), Sunnyvale, Calif., has announced its Benchmark Alliance Program for leading hardware, database and enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors who use LoadRunner, the industry standard for enterprise load testing, in their benchmarking and competency centers to produce and publish standard benchmark results. Participants in the program are The Baan Company, Compaq, Data General, Dell Computer Corporation, IBM Solution Partnership Centers, IBM AS/400 Benchmark Center, Informix, Hewlett- Packard Company's Network Server Division, Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Sequent, Sybase and Unisys.

With 14 leading hardware and software vendors using LoadRunner to provide realistic, accurate benchmark numbers, organizations will be able to evaluate and compare various hardware, database and ERP configurations for their specific needs with a consistent "yardstick" to make more informed business decisions.

"As IS organizations plan their enterprise systems, comparable benchmarks are crucial to enable them to compare and choose among a variety of different configurations," said Dick Heiman, application development tools research manager at International Data Corporation. "Vendors using LoadRunner in their competency centers are able to deliver benchmark information with a single tool, which provides consistency when comparing various hardware and software configurations."

Enterprise applications support a wide variety of operating systems, networking protocols and databases, creating a very large number of permutations of hardware, network and software components. Benchmark results are dependent on specific system design, application requirements, and implementation strategies. Interactions among these components and individual business processes may require substantial configuration trade-offs and performance tuning.

Using a single tool, ERP vendors can create standard benchmark scripts that can be used by all of their database and hardware partners. For example, Mercury Interactive and PeopleSoft recently announced the completion of a certified PeopleSoft benchmark utilizing LoadRunner to generate 10,000 concurrent users for PeopleSoft HRMS 7.0 Online. (Editors, please see announcement entitled "Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner Drives Successful 10,000-User Benchmark for PeopleSoft HRMS 7 Online," dated June 8, 1998). The same LoadRunner scripts can also be used to test a variety of hardware configurations.

Since LoadRunner is the only load testing tool that supports all of the major ERP vendors (Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP), hardware and database vendors can use LoadRunner with a single consistent set of benchmarks in order to simplify hardware sizing and optimize performance for each customer environment, thus increasing confidence of successfully delivering complex enterprise applications.

Thorough testing under production load allows users to predict system behavior and optimize performance before going live. Organizations purchasing hardware or software from vendors in the Benchmark Alliance Program can also use LoadRunner in their own custom environment to predict performance of their specific configurations prior to deployment.

Amdocs Limited, a leading international provider of customer-care and billing solutions to the telecommunications industry, recently announced benchmark test results that demonstrate the scalability and processing throughput capability of the Amdocs Ensemble system.

"In today's high-growth telecom industry, telecom billing solutions must provide cost-effective and open-ended scalability to accommodate rapidly expanding subscriber volumes," said Norman Rafalowitz, Amdocs' senior vice president for International Marketing. "Using LoadRunner we successfully emulated 9,000 concurrent customer service users, proving the capability of the Ensemble family of products to easily accommodate the current and future volume requirements of even the largest telecom companies."

Mercury Interactive's Benchmark Alliance Program

Vendors participating in the Benchmark Alliance Program are able to create benchmarks with a single tool that can verify performance across the enterprise. As members of the Benchmark Alliance Program vendors receive access to the latest version of LoadRunner with full customer support including upgrades, applicable test libraries, and free certification on Mercury Interactive products.

LoadRunner

LoadRunner is a load testing tool that predicts system behavior and performance. It exercises an entire enterprise infrastructure by emulating thousands of users to isolate problems, optimize performance and accelerate deployment. LoadRunner supports the widest range of enterprise application environments including custom client/server, ERP, e-business and legacy.

About Mercury Interactive Corporation

Mercury Interactive (www.merc-int.com) is the worldwide leader in enterprise application testing solutions. The company offers a comprehensive line of automated enterprise tools that address the full range of quality needs for testing clients/server, e-business, Year 2000, Euro and packaged applications. Its testing solutions enable corporations, system integrators and independent software vendors to identify software errors more quickly and efficiently than traditional methods allow.

Mercury Interactive has its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., and maintains offices throughout the United States and internationally with a network of distributors throughout the world. The company's common stock trades on the Nasdaq National Market tier of The Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol MERQ.

Note to Editors: LoadRunner is a registered trademark of Mercury Interactive Corporation, Sunnyvale, Calif. Product and company names are used herein for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Mercury Interactive Benchmark Alliance Program Partners

"Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner enables us to test the scalability of the Baan system and focus on tuning our software for optimized performance. By standardizing on LoadRunner for benchmarking across all our supported platforms we can provide our customers with consistent, comparable and repeatable benchmarking numbers."

Leen van der Maas Director of Baan Research & Development The Baan Company

"Data General, as the leading supplier of midrange NT servers (according to IDC), has found that a key portion of the value proposition our customers expect from us is accurate prediction of performance and capacity for their ERP software. By using Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner, we are able to continuously improve our ability to provide customers with the processing they need in the most cost-effective configurations."

Richard Clifton Vice President, Worldwide Application Competence Data General Corp.

"Dell will use LoadRunner in its Systems Performance Analysis Lab to characterize and improve system performance for our products in every server category. Our mission is to ensure that our customers maximize their performance and LoadRunner is a vital tool to assist us in that effort."

Tony Yaptangco Manager of Systems Engineering Dell Computer Corporation

"We are using Mercury's LoadRunner with the new Oracle Network Computing Architecture (NCA) driver to assist in configuration, sizing, and benchmark activities with Oracle Applications. LoadRunner allows us to recommend the right solution to meet our customers' Oracle Application server needs, whether that solution is an HP NetServer system running Windows NT or an HP 9000 running HP-UX."

Cathy FitzGerald Worldwide Marketing Manager for HP's Network Server Division Hewlett-Packard Company

"IBM is using LoadRunner in its AS/400 Benchmark Center lab in Rochester, Minnesota for AS/400 testing by Business Partners and Customers. At the AS/400 Benchmark Center, we provide custom batch, interactive, and client/server benchmark services on custom AS/400 hardware configurations. Using LoadRunner, our customers are able to answer with confidence questions like, `can we handle 64,000 transactions per hour,' and `what will my response time be if I double the number of users,' and `can my current configuration support 1200 client/server users?' Additionally with LoadRunner, we provide a benchmarking environment for ERP vendors such as JD Edwards, Lawson Software, SSA, Intensia, and PeopleSoft."

Terry Ford Performance Analyst IBM AS/400 Benchmark Center

"Mercury Interactive's technology is a valuable asset to the IBM Solution Developer Program's Solution Partnership Center and to the developers who use the center. It complements IBM's objective of providing developers with the resources they need to get their applications to market faster and lower their cost of doing business. With LoadRunner at the Solution Partnership Centers, developers will be able to test their server performances against an industry standard to ensure quality products."

Patricia Meacham Director of Worldwide Solution Developer Marketing IBM

"Informix is impressed with the ease of use features in LoadRunner 5.0 which will have a positive effect on our future benchmarking and quality assurance activities (QA) with our premiere application partners. The basic design and capabilities of the product should automate the scaling of users in benchmark and tests greatly. We look forward to working with Mercury Interactive in using these new capabilities as well as the partnership opportunities provided by their Benchmark Alliance program."

David Lebsack Director of Partner Product Development Informix Corporation

"PeopleSoft will be using LoadRunner in Strategic Technical Services for the development of PeopleSoft Performance Toolkits (PTK) which are then run by PeopleSoft Certified PTK Engineers to produce PeopleSoft standardized on-line benchmarks. Using LoadRunner, our partners will be able to rapidly produce sizing and high volume performance metrics on various hardware, database and application configurations in a 3-tier environment."

Rachelle Apgar Manager of Performance Toolkits PeopleSoft

"Sequent will be utilizing Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner software in its Enterprise Solution Center, to demonstrate the scalability of Sequent's NUMAcenter. Customers will be able to visualize load and scalability factors across their Sequent NUMAcenter in order to meet their current and future business needs."

Don Lobaugh Sr. Solutions Integration Engineer Sequent Computer Systems Inc.

"Using LoadRunner in Sybase's Application Solutions Division, we will be able to publish benchmark results and tune ERP applications running on Sybase database servers. As a result, customers can be assured their applications have been well-exercised in the lab so they can hit their performance goals when they go live with new servers and applications."

Howard Sardis Manager of Application Solutions Sybase

"Unisys has employed LoadRunner to benchmark ERP applications on Unisys enterprise-class NT servers in its East Coast Competency Center. LoadRunner is the best tool on the market for high water benchmarks that help customers make hardware sizing decisions to fit their specific application environments."

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