MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Mercury Interactive Corporation , the global leader in business technology optimization (BTO) software, today announced that AREK, a consortium of pension providers in Finland, has selected Mercury Performance Center(TM) to optimize performance of business-critical applications supporting the delivery of services and day-to-day processing of pension data for its member companies. Mercury Performance Center is a strategic part of Mercury BTO Enterprise(TM), the industry's first integrated suite of BTO offerings designed to help customers optimize the business outcomes of IT.

AREK was founded by 11 Finnish pension fund providers to develop and manage a massive rollout of critical business applications that will help member companies and other pension fund providers comply with The 2005 Pension Reform in Finland. The reform, negotiated between the central organizations of employers and the trade unions and representatives of the central government, came into effect in early 2005. The regulations are anticipated to be enforced starting in 2007.

AREK selected Mercury Performance Center to help make sure their business- critical applications operate as expected and can reliably service both pension professionals and their clients who require an online facility to check pension statements. These applications will help member companies to collect client payments, gain access to pension information and process other forms of transactions associated with the pensions industry.

"Superior performance of AREK's business applications is paramount to the success of our consortium," said Heikki Auvinen, development manager, at AREK. "It is expected that AREK will service nearly 100 percent of the country's pension fund transactions in the future. To properly service the pension fund industry and comply with our regulatory requirements, we rely on Mercury Performance Center to achieve uncompromising application reliability."

ABOUT MERCURY PERFORMANCE CENTER

Mercury Performance Center allows customers to automate application load testing and helps verify that applications will meet business performance requirements. Mercury Performance Center includes integrated applications and a business dashboard for key performance optimization activities including load-testing; performance tuning; capacity planning; and J2EE diagnostics across complex, heterogeneous computing environments. Mercury Performance Center can scale to handle a range of performance validation projects -- ranging from single projects to Enterprise Performance Centers of Excellence.

ABOUT AREK

Founded in 2005, AREK (http://www.arek.fi/) was created by a consortium of Finnish pension fund providers to develop and manage a joint IT Infrastructure ahead of new government regulations due to be enforced on Finland's pensions industry in 2007. Today AREK is in the middle of a massive rollout that will support the delivery of services and day-to-day processing of pensions data.

ABOUT MERCURY

Mercury Interactive Corporation, the global leader in business technology optimization (BTO) software, is committed to helping customers optimize the business value of information technology. Founded in 1989, Mercury conducts business worldwide and is one of the largest enterprise software companies today. Mercury provides software and services for IT Governance, Application Delivery and Application Management. Customers worldwide rely on Mercury offerings to govern the priorities, processes and people of IT and test and manage the quality and performance of business-critical applications. Mercury BTO offerings are complemented by technologies and services from global business partners. For more information, please visit http://www.mercury.com/.

NOTE: Mercury, Mercury BTO Enterprise, Mercury Performance Center and the Mercury logo are trademarks of Mercury Interactive Corporation and may be registered in certain jurisdictions.

All other company, brand and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

CONTACT: Scott Pace of Mercury, +1-650-603-4675, or space@mercury.com;
or Elizabeth Crosta of Ogilvy Public Relations, +1-415-677-2800, or
elizabeth.crosta@ogilvypr.com, for Mercury

Web site: http://www.mercuryinteractive.com/
http://www.arek.fi/

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