Pipeline Q&A: Micromuse

Integrated and Focused on its Customers

This month, Pipeline sat down with Micromuse's Chief Technology Officer Craig Farrell. What we found is that Micromuse is preparing to reassert its leadership position in the OSS market - citing both its visible success with Telecom Italia and its technology partnership with 19 of the world's 20 largest service providers - but understands that it faces some distinct challenges as well. As the company continues to integrate and align its product suite in the wake of several acquisitions and new developments, the market may be turning in its favor. Micromuse was founded based on the vision that networks would migrate almost entirely to IP, and therefore a massive need for IP service management and assurance tools would arise. As the industry shifts to IP services and applications on a broad scale, Micromuse may be poised to take a large step forward - though only time and performance will tell.

Pipeline: What has telecom's ice age been like for Micromuse, and what can you tell us about the company's market focus moving forward?

Farrell: The last three years has been a roller coaster ride and a dose of reality for everyone. But Micromuse has addressed it in a couple of ways. We've become more solutions focused as a company, with solutions in areas where we still could see growth like mobile and VoIP. We've set about improving our focus on enterprise as well, with business dashboards. But [enterprise customers] are far more concerned with applications and services. They see the network more as something that you use. We've made some changes [as a result of these factors].

In the last 12 months we kicked off "Project Melody" to achieve a common look and feel across all of our products and our integration stores. One of the purposes behind Project Melody was to bring integration in across the whole suite. For example, there are a number of polling technologies within the company and some rationalization needs to happen there to bring them all together. So there was a bunch of housekeeping we've had to do to rationalize the common components across these various product lines.

Moving forward, we're focusing on solutions around areas like security. Also, we have all the toolkits and components you need to build dashboards, but we'd like to have, for example, a standard mobile operator dashboard with standard solutions and metrics. We are fortunate in the customer base we have. We have a lot of mobile operators as customers and that gives us a lot of intellectual property and expertise to bring back into the product.

What was it about the enterprise market that didn't entirely work for MUSE, and how can you assure telco customers that you will remain focused on their businesses?

It's not that enterprise didn't work out for us. Getting into enterprise does take time. We had to build the dashboards (for enterprise specifically) and it took some time to deal with the management team changes around our enterprise offerings. Some of these things take time in addition to the integration of the products and building the dashboards. These initiatives are still going on, and we've been working with our telco customers all along, so it's not like it's a major focus shift back to telcos.

We're still in there talking with our telco customers. We still need to maintain our products, and we're in there talking to them about what we can do better for them. Last week I attended our customer council with companies like T-Mobile, Nextel, and Verizon Wireless. We have these guys telling us what they're doing with the product and telling us specifically what they need to use the product for and how they need it extended.

Customers will make you smart - and they teach us what we need to do and how to make the dashboards that they want. We're lucky because we already have this customer base to draw from and it speaks volumes as to how important our product is. 19 out of 20 of the world's largest service providers have our product installed not because it's something nice, but because it's something that they need to have.

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