Borland is beginning to digest their acquisition of Segue and the Silk toolset.  Today they announced Borland Lifecycle Quality Management.  According to eWeek.com, "Borland LQM supports requirements definition and management; test management and execution; architecture and design analysis; development test and defect prevention; automated functional testing; performance and scalability testing; and defect tracking and version control..."  Of course tools to support these activities have been available from a variety of vendors for quite some time.  It will be interesting to see whether this is more marketing-speak (everybody needs acronyms - all the better if they contain the work "Lifecycle" these days!), or if Borland achieves real advances in integrating this tool suite.

The HP acquisition of Mercury is expected to close in the next 30 to 45 days.  People are speculating about how Mercury will plug into the HP software division, which is still busy integrating the Peregrine acquisition.  Mercury has not done a lot of internal product innovation in the past few years, preferring to add products and capabilities via their own acquisitions.  I wonder if that will change under the HP culture, which has been more engineering-driven (vs. the marketing-and-sales driven culture of Mercury). 

IBM has had much more time to adapt to their acquisition of Rational, and they have been rolling out new products and incentives to companies that switch from Mercury to IBM Rational tools.

It's a fast-changing landscape for buyers and users of QA and testing tools, which entails both opportunity and  risk.