London-based Micromuse Ltd has its sights on the US market, with its Netcool/OMNIbus line. Five-year-old Micromuse, the former Sparcsystems builder turned Sun Microsystems Inc reseller, has a turnover of UKP12m and a staff of 55. It also has a US operation called Acronym although there are no permanent staff yet. It now provides technical expertise and turnkey systems for complex networks; not network management in the sense of bridges, routers and hubs, but a three-tier system to run open systems, with Simple Network Management Protocol-based agents at the bottom, the standard network management tools in the middle, and tools on top that range from help desks to security management and baselining tools. Having derived its products from the US for most of its history, Micromuse has now set up a separate company, Omnibus Transport Technologies, to provide its technology base. This has resulted in the Netcool range. First out, six months ago, was Netcool/LegacyWatch, which enables SNMP-based systems to monitor non-SNMP devices. Micromuse says British Telecommunications Plc is using LegacyWatch to monitor a lot of its old switches and devices. The product costs UKP35,0000 for a development kit that includes a training course. AS/400 and VAX It can also be used to monitor AS/400s and VAX devices. Next up from Micromuse was Netcool/tools, which marketing manager Mike Silvey describes as not strategic, but useful. For UKP5,000, you get a suite of four tools that enhance Sunnet Manager, adding some of the features that Sun forgot, such as a more efficient ping agent and multi-user capabilities. And the final card in the pack is Netcool/OMNIbus, a fault information system that sits on top of the standard management systems and handles the fault information coming out of them. The listening part is handled by a piece of software called Probe, though Silvey says that name may change, as it sounds too much like a piece of hardware, which picks up the fault information and hands it on to an object server. This in turn looks at the faults being passed on and filters the information through to the desktop part of the system. OMNIbus uses the messaging services of the network management systems to pass information between the probes and the object server, so the initial release is for the three major SNMP management systems. It runs from Solaris and, soon, Windows clients. The software costs UKP35,000 for a base system, which includes the object server, two probes and two desktops. The bits can be bought separately; the object server costs UKP17,000, probes are UKP2,000 and desktops UKP5,000 each.
