Pipeline Q&A: Micromuse (cont'd)

What is it about Netcool/Impact that you believe makes it so different from what competitors are offering?

Netcool/Impact takes that raw event stream and for any particular fault can, for example, look at your provisioning database and understand how that customer is affected and what service level they are on. This adds a lot of value to our product and this is one way we can help our telco customers to go back in, take better advantage of their installed products and solve some major problems. We call it "event enrichment" - we take the raw data and enrich it in many ways. That's what really makes the product sing - having all this information from various databases and figuring out who is affected and what it means to the customer.

There's an entire language within Netcool/Impact that you can use to script and write Impact policies. Anything you want to do with data - poll it, manipulate it, etc. - you can do with this solution. Some of the other companies have a dashboard or screen or graph of what the problem is, but with Impact you can actually write the policy, and extend and customize the graph. We have the same display capabilities as many others, but we can deliver more information. Netcool/Impact has a complete programming language in its own right and can perform any calculations and correlations that you want. The real back-end components are there and that comes from being inside the world's largest carriers. It can scale and deal with these large networks. Each one is unique and you have to be powerful and flexible to solve the problems each of these carriers is asking you to solve. That's the sort of pedigree that we come from.

This month's issue is all about mobile customer experience. As a provider of solutions that enable service assurance, what demands are you seeing from your mobile operator customers to improve customer experience? What are you doing with your products to help improve customer experience both in care interactions and on the network?

Netcool/Impact absolutely plays here, and we're being called upon to build dashboards for our wireless customers. They are looking for quality metrics, successful calls, dropped calls. We're providing impact analysis which deduces this into a wireless specific screen - what are the factors that affect churn, and are they getting better or worse? If they just spent money on some new equipment they want to know how that is that affecting churn. Our new dashboards product (Netcool Realtime Active Dashboards) is really aimed at producing those dashboards and solutions around it. We are getting this feedback from the largest operators in the world. What we're seeing more from our customers is less on seeing a graph of a router but rather tying back what we find about real business problems - our customers care about churn, so Netcool relates for them the things that are being monitored or measured back to business problems. They have spent money on the management of this and that, but finding a way to translate that information back into the business issues is what matters most.

Micromuse has made a number of acquisitions and some analysts have questioned how well the company has leveraged them. What's the key, from your perspective as CTO, to taking full advantage of acquired technologies?

The secret to any acquisition is integration - you need to do that well. The integration is more important than the buy decision, which is actually relatively easy. Making the integration happen and rolling it out to your customers is what you really need to do well. For example, Micromuse acquired Network Harmoni (in August 2003 for $23 million in cash) it was already selling the products. The technology was there - already integrated - and the sales people knew how to sell it, so it was already pretty well down the path. The best products to buy are the ones you're already selling because it makes the [product, business and organizational] integration easier.

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. There was some housekeeping we had to do to rationalize the common components across these various product lines and foster complete integration. One of the purposes behind Project Melody was to bring integration in across the whole suite.

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