Micromuse setting their sights high

1999-10-28

Enterprise Management software company Micromuse saw its shares soar by 30 percent as the company announced a doubling in its fourth quarter revenue at the end of last week.

From lowly beginnings in London, UK, the company launched on the Nasdaq in February 1998. In the early days, the company had a strong relationship with BT. The company has stuck with telecommunications as one of its core markets, a move which has stood it in good stead for the proliferation of ISPs and the eCommerce revolution.

Micromuse’s core product is NetCool, an event management system which is designed to enable events to be received from any device. This simple principle has allowed the NetCool product to be extended across a whole raft of protocols and device types, including SNMP devices, databases, WAN/Voice devices and TCP/IP protocol connections. Application interfaces (e.g. for SAP) are currently being considered.

Based on this core product, Micromuse have driven their product range in two directions and it is this which is getting the analysts excited. The first is NetCool/ISM, which simulates web site requests in a variety of protocols and feeds the results into the NetCool framework. This enables the monitoring of Web site performance, from the basic request-response level up to more complex series of transactions. Monitors can be situated anywhere in the world (to gauge international differences in performance) with the results fed back into a central NetCool installation. The second product is Impact, which uses historical records, configuration information and external databases to build an information set to aid the resolution of a given fault. Impact won a “best in class” award at NetWorld InterOp this year.

The market for Web-oriented management tools is burgeoning, with a variety of old and new players jumping on the bandwagon. Micromuse have a head start, in that they have worked in the comms space since their inception. They understand the issues and they already have an enviable set of customer and partner relationships including AOL, AT&T and BT. The NetCool/ISM product is based on the company’s existing platform, which is a differentiator from Tivoli, for example, and which isn’t a possibility for newer vendors such as FreshWater. Investors are already sitting up and taking note, all of which paints a rosy future for Micromuse.

(First published 28 October 1999)