Mercury Israel general manager Uri Agmon is far from a member of the Israeli high-tech aristocracy. His character was not forged in the furnace of Israel's elitist industry, nor is he a graduate of the high-tech commando like Elron or Scitex. Agmon, a former division commander, comes from the system whose chiefs not so long ago used to parachute into politics or public company directorships - the army. No longer. Today, an increasing number of senior military commanders prefer, naturally, high-tech companies.
Agmon says, "A corporation's management and organization are not too different from military ones. Like in an army division, one must manage a highly complex, dynamic system which is part of a comprehensive organization - Mercury Interactive (MERQ)."
Globes: How did you come to Mercury? .
Agmon : "My arrival was thanks to Mercury's founder Aryeh Finegold. After I was discharged from the Army, I went to work for a start-up company. Mercury Israel was founded at that time, in 1995, but lacked a director. Finegold convinced me to join the company's management. I started out in charge of finance and later ran the marketing and sales department. Upon arrival at each department, I simply told the staff, 'Shalom, I am Uri Agmon and from now on we will be working together.' That was how I worked until I was told, "From now on you're the manager."
Was the staff intimidated by the appointment of a military man as general manager?
"In truth, they were afraid at first, and thought that here was someone who wanted to overturn everything. Over time, they realized that my goal was to make the company better together with its employees. We achieved the target of $100 million in sales by having the company's different departments working in cooperation."
What is the relationship between mercury Israel and the California office?
"The development center which employs 400 people is located in Israel. The European and Eastern regional directors are also located here, due to the geographical proximity. In addition, we also operate a customer support system."
You develop software testing equipment, but as the world moves onto the Internet, has Mercury managed the change?
"Mercury significantly changed its corporate direction in 1999. Previously, we only handled software testing, in a tri-stage process. The first stage was a functional test, i.e. we made certain that the software worked at all. Then we would run a load test to determine the number of users the system could handle. The third stage consisted of the testing process itself, to locate specific problems and provide solutions. When everyone was dealing with Y2K, we had already looked beyond this issue and were developing Internet products. We have in fact become an Internet infrastructure company and adapted all our products to the Internet environment. The next stage will be the move into the live work environment."
What do you mean?
"It is not enough to check the time companies take to respond to on-line purchase orders on paper. You have to check performance capability. I'm talking about, sites that cannot handle the customer load after signing a service level agreement (SLA). If you are not available to all the customers flooding the site simultaneously, they will simply go make their purchases elsewhere."
Who carries out the real-time tests?
"In the past, we sold products that enabled companies to check network performance themselves. This required companies to allocate specialist manpower for this purpose. Now that we have launched active watch, we offer them the same level of testing, but offsite, by our own experts. We request full access to the company being tested, and we produce monthly load reports for it. There is an additional advantage to this method. We lease the software to companies at a far lower cost than purchased software."
Such tests are likely to be shown to be ineffective the moment the site crashes. How do know precisely what is the saturation point of a particular site?
"We developed the "active test" for this purpose. This is a service that tries to crash a company's website by flooding it with all kinds of requests from locations throughout the world where our and our partners' computers are located."
Do you know how to solve any software problem today?
"There are three stages for every test. The first and most important is to internalize the fact that there is a problem. The second stage is to locate it, and only at the third stage is the problem's seriousness determined. Today, we offer comprehensive solutions to the first two stages. The problem in the testing market is the lack of more specific data on the problem's significance and location. For example, if a company's site has a problem, it is necessary to locate what stage of the software has the problem, and to recommend a solution. Sometimes, a company is forced back to the software's drawing board or algorithms. But knowing precisely where the problem is saves considerable development time."
This is the field that Mercury is focusing on today?
Mercury's dream is offer complete solutions to the monitoring world, but there is still along way to go. It is too early to estimate the size of this market, but it is already clear that the automatic monitoring will overshadow the regular testing market."
Comverse president Kobi Alexander said yesterday that the company would not set up additional centers in Israel if the government does not give it research funding. Mercury is also an American company, but its development center is in Israel. Would you think twice before doing this today?
"The lack of engineers is a serious problem, but it exists in Silicon Valley too. I agree that the country has to find a solution to this situation. It would be impossible for Mercury to set up a 1,000-person research facility today. Nevertheless, despite the shortage, Mercury will not make staying in Israel contingent upon government funding. We have settled in Israel and we intend to stay here."
Published by Israel's Business Arena on July 16, 2000