Micromuse Ltd has decided to leapfrog the development of NetCool One, its static configuration and asset management software, to come out with NetCool Three for systems and network management in the third quarter. NetCool One’s hardware-based functionality will simply form a subset of NetCool Three. The London-based Sun Microsystems Inc dreseller claims there was only a matter of three or four months development time between the two releases, and so decided to focus on managing applications dynamically, as that is where prospective customer interest lay. The ability to drag and drop an application from one machine to another will also be included at a later date, it adds. The firm reckons it can generate revenues of about ?500,000 from NetCool in the first year alone on the back of interest shown in existing customer sites. It is currently also in the process of bundling a set of Sun NetManger utilities it developed internally for existing clients to create NetCool Utilities. Such utilities include the ability to link various copies of the application together to create one multi-user version, which means an action undertaken on one version of NetManager will register on all other copies, for example. The product should be available this quarter for about ?5,000. Micromuse has also just started shipping LegacyWatch, a graphical software development tool that manages non-SNMP-based environments from SNMP-based systems via intelligent agents. LegacyWatch costs ?20,000 or so, and the firm already claims to have generated ?50,000 worth of sales from it. All of the above products run under Solaris 1 and 2, but the company is in discussions with other vendors about other ports. It expects to turn over between ?12m and ?13m this year, about 15% of which should come from mainland Europe. Micromuse is currently also exploring ways of getting into the US market via its US venture, Acronym.
