Why you should care about BTO

Ever patched up an old car or bike to put off buying a new one? Perhaps you didn't have the cash to splash out or you're just someone who likes to get good use out of things.

If you help run an IT department or even run the whole business (one which invariably spends a lot on technology) you might now find yourself in a similar position. The downturn has hit most companies and if you can wring more use out of existing investments, then that's all the better.

This is where we find ourselves today with a new announcement. It is common for silicon.com to hear about new products. It happens everyday and 'company X releases new version of product Y' stories can be very dull. We avoid them.

But when we hear about whole new categorisations, our ears prick up. Yours might too.

Mercury Interactive, a successful but by no means giant software vendor, has today come out - with the help of people like Forrester, Gartner and new partner Accenture - to preach BTO.

BTO stands for business technology optimisation. You may already know this. Gartner told us it has been "very, very positive" about BTO for a while. And it is an idea that just seems to, well, make sense.

The rather obvious idea is that most companies have spent small fortunes on IT (hardware and software) yet it mostly fails to live up to promises.

Existing tools to test and manage existing equipment are usually very hard for a non-IT person to understand, let alone act upon. So BTO, and Mercury's product today (expect more from other vendors), is all about managing what you have from a single console or 'cockpit', as it says.

We like this idea - especially when return on investment (ROI) and budget freezes are the issues of the day and the idea is that non-IT people can understand what's going on.

However, the underlying caveat is also an obvious one. Let's not get mixed up in the technology part of BTO from technology companies. An Accenture, in Mercury's case, has to be a partner because people and processes are more important to success than bytes and bits.

BTO must have at its heart BPM (business process management), a decidedly less glamorous TLA (three-letter acronym - do keep up), and one which we doubt analysts are getting that excited about.

Well-run businesses know that, as do the higher-ups at Mercury and other vendors. Let's hope their salesmen do too.