San Francisco-Micromuse Inc. (Nasdaq:MUSE), the leading provider of fault and service-levelmanagement software, today announced an initiative to deliver new integrated, advanced faultanalysis capabilities to service providers through its participation in the New World Ecosystem program established by Cisco Systems, Inc., (Nasdaq: CSCO). The Cisco New World Ecosystem is a community of technology partners working together to enable service providers to rapidly develop and deploy innovative telecommunications services. These technology partners support Cisco's standards-based architectures and commitment to interoperable multi-vendor solutions.
Rapid deployment of integrated, high-performance network management solutions is of paramount importance to service providers striving to roll out new services quickly and improve time-to-profitability in an area of intense competition. Micromuse will be using the New World Ecosystem program to market and deliver several new Cisco Info Center enhancements, now nearing completion. In addition, Micromuse's award-winning fault-impact analysis technology is currently being integrated into Cisco's Virtual Private Network (VPN) Solutions Center. The advanced network discovery and root cause analysis technology recently acquired by Micromuse includes device-specific support for all Cisco routers, Cisco Catalyst 5000 switches and Catalyst 2900 series switches. Micromuse has also developed a customized Netcool Probe for Cisco's Element Management Framework (EMF). To further support the New World Ecosystem Program's goal of collaboration among technology vendors, Micromuse is currently integrating Netcool technology with Operations Support System (OSS) applications from key Ecosystem partners including Atlantech, Architel Systems, Concord Communications and Portal.
Micromuse's award winning Netcool. technology forms the basis for Cisco Info Center, a key operations component of the Cisco Service Management (CSM) system. Over 60 leading service providers worldwide have licensed Cisco Info Center's critical fault and service-level management functionality to help them deliver high-quality services effectively and efficiently.
"The Cisco New World Ecosystem program strengthens this important relationship between our two companies by providing Micromuse with additional marketing and technology resources to quickly deliver its latest technology enhancements to Cisco's customer base," said Steve Hoch, director of marketing for Cisco's service provider line of business. "These efforts will consolidate and centralize end-to-end service management through integrated OSS solutions, and further solidify Cisco's position as the leading provider of carrier-grade solutions for New World service providers."
Cisco's New World Ecosystem program facilitates collaboration among Cisco technology members to deliver solutions with predefined integration between best-of-breed OSS applications. Predefined integration accelerates the deployment of new applications for service providers, helping new service rollouts achieve profitability more quickly.
"Our successful OEM relationship with Cisco has been a key ingredient of Micromuse's channel strategy for over two years," said Mike Donohue, senior vice president of sales for Micromuse."In recent months we have seen heightened demand for our technology from Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other customers whose services are based on convergence networks. The New World Ecosystem program is a great vehicle for strengthening our channel within these growing market sectors."
The Netcool-based Info Center suite supports more than 150 off-the-shelf interfaces that collect management data from a wide variety of systems and protocols. The data is rapidly processed and filtered by the Cisco Info Center ObjectServer, an in-memory database. The ObjectServer allows operators to build views of services in real time, helping them manage networks more efficiently. Because it is scalable and deploys rapidly, Cisco Info Center allows service providers to expand their networks as their markets grow.
