Pipeline Q&A: Micromuse (cont'd)

In a recent press release, Lloyd Carney, Micromuse Chairman and CEO was quoted as saying, "We were adversely affected by longer sales cycles due to the cautious decision making in the marketplace." Micromuse isn't the only company being affected in this way. What factors, in your opinion, are causing such extended and cautious decision making among carriers when it comes to OSS?

There is a lot more decision making by larger committees and the decision has to go further up in the organization to be approved. Plus, there is a big focus on Proofs of Concept and customers are asking vendors to demonstrate ROI right away, saying "prove these ROI numbers to me." So the POCs are longer in order to show that ROI before they buy. The CxO level guys are really making sure that for every dollar they spend they see an ROI in a relatively short time. Once you do get through that [POC], the approval process is longer and more people seem to be involved in it.

What about the OSS market's unfortunate reputation for over-promising and under-delivering and how that might affect sales cycles?

There may be a bit of that too. Every industry has that sort of problem. We really try not to do that (over promise and under deliver). For example, at Telecom Italia they wanted to do zero-touch provisioning and were very ambitious. This project promised an awful lot and huge ROI numbers. Last year in Dallas (Telecom Italia) were showing this product off with products from multiple companies including MUSE. This was a long term, large project.

So, there's an example of us with big projects and big customers and the results were really impressive. Despite the difficulties of the past few years in telecom they (Telecom Italia) did succeed and are seeing the benefits and saving themselves some money. DSL roll out is absolutely happening for them. They spent the money and put the solution in place, and they have a world-class solution right now.

Telecom Italia did promote this DSL zero-touch provisioning project at the TeleManagement World event in Dallas in November 2003. Involved in this significant implementation and integration project were Granite Systems (now part of Telcordia Technologies), Syndesis, TIBCO and Micromuse. The resulting benefits Telecom Italia stated it has realized include:

• 20% increase in efficiency for network inventory processes
• 10% increase in efficiency for service assurance processes
• Reduction in provisioning time by four minutes per order
• ADSL delivery time reduced from 21 days to 7 days
• Root cause analysis of faults reduced by 30 minutes per event
• Trouble ticket creation time reduced by 15 minutes per ticket
• 26 regional centers removed with 80% reduction in staff
• Event alarms reduced by 333:1 ratio
• Mean time to repair reduced by 50%
• Significant enhancements in QoS for customers

There are cases where customers with Micromuse products - Omnibus in particular - find that they are extracting tons of data from their networks, but have trouble doing anything useful with it. They aren't always turning to Micromuse specifically to solve the problem. How do you plan to address these customers and make things easier for them?

We've sold the OMNIBUS product the most, and the real secret to getting more value out of that is our Impact product. It's such a versatile product. It can bring data in from any number of sources and get to the question of what does this fault or event mean for me and for my customers. This is an Impact story. When people say they have a bunch of raw data and need to turn that into useful information, we need to educate them on how to use Impact. Our competitors don't really build anything that's as versatile. I'd like to see a lot more of our customers using the product and getting even more use out of this raw data by turning it into information.

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