Micromuse Ships Netcool/Impact Version 2.3; Upgrade Features Event Enrichment, Usability Enhancements; Access to More Data Sources

Business Wire, May 13, 2002

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NICE, France--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 13, 2002

Micromuse Inc. (Nasdaq: MUSE), the leading provider of service and business assurance software, today announced the general availability of Version 2.3 of its Netcool(R)/Impact(TM) software application.

The award winning application - which has been deployed in hundreds of the world's leading service provider and enterprise networks - helps business operations teams rapidly determine and correlate how problems in the IT infrastructure will affect customers, business processes, network-based services, and applications.

"As a consulting company for leading customer-service oriented businesses, we focus on partnering with customers to enable them to maintain uptime of IT services," said Sean McDermott, President & CEO, Windward Consulting Group. "Netcool/Impact automatically adds high-level business-oriented information to Netcool/OMNIbus-collected events. This allows customers to quickly locate problems and implement resolution processes and policies, thus keeping revenue-generating business services up and significantly reducing mean time to repair. We see this as a huge value to our customers."

The Netcool/Impact application works closely with Micromuse's flagship Netcool/OMNIbus(TM) realtime IT management application to determine how Netcool/OMNIbus-collected faults might impact the availability of services and business critical applications, including software solutions such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan, Siebel and Oracle. Typical implementations of the Netcool/Impact application help operations teams rapidly answer the following frequently recurring questions:

-- The Netcool/Impact DSA for XML allows operators to read XML DTD from a file
or HTTP and provides connectivity to a vast array of popular XML-enabled
applications.

-- The Netcool/Impact DSA for SNMP allows users to execute SNMP gets and sets.
This DSA extends Netcool/Impact's realm of control to the SNMP-manageable
device level, allowing operators to better manage certain aspects of SNMP
devices through Netcool/Impact policies.

Using both out-of-the-box and user customized management policies the Netcool/Impact application provides realtime access to enterprise-wide knowledge centers and data sources. These include asset and inventory management packages, such as Cramer and Granite; bus vendors, including Tibco and Vitria; and relational databases such as Oracle and Sybase.

Using these predefined policies, the Netcool/Impact application links, for example, problem resolution information with network fault information, which enables IT staff to reduce repair time of infrastructure problems. When integrated with other applications in the Netcool suite, or with Micromuse Alliance Partner applications, Netcool/Impact provides a key component of the following solutions:

-- The Netcool/Impact DSA for XML allows operators to read XML DTD from a file
or HTTP and provides connectivity to a vast array of popular XML-enabled
applications.

-- The Netcool/Impact DSA for SNMP allows users to execute SNMP gets and sets.
This DSA extends Netcool/Impact's realm of control to the SNMP-manageable
device level, allowing operators to better manage certain aspects of SNMP
devices through Netcool/Impact policies.

New in Netcool/Impact Version 2.3

With version 2.3, the Netcool/Impact application provides increased usability and performance, which offers the following increased value to businesses:

-- The Netcool/Impact DSA for XML allows operators to read XML DTD from a file
or HTTP and provides connectivity to a vast array of popular XML-enabled
applications.

-- The Netcool/Impact DSA for SNMP allows users to execute SNMP gets and sets.
This DSA extends Netcool/Impact's realm of control to the SNMP-manageable
device level, allowing operators to better manage certain aspects of SNMP
devices through Netcool/Impact policies.

Version 2.3 also includes two new Netcool/Impact Data Source Adapters (DSAs), which access IT and business intelligence information from various resources throughout the IT infrastructure:

-- The Netcool/Impact DSA for XML allows operators to read XML DTD from a file
or HTTP and provides connectivity to a vast array of popular XML-enabled
applications.

-- The Netcool/Impact DSA for SNMP allows users to execute SNMP gets and sets.
This DSA extends Netcool/Impact's realm of control to the SNMP-manageable
device level, allowing operators to better manage certain aspects of SNMP
devices through Netcool/Impact policies.

The Netcool/Impact application is generally available now. The software will be demonstrated at TeleManagement World in Nice, France on May 13th - 16th, at Micromuse stand #30. Screen shots are available upon request.

About the Netcool Suite

Micromuse's Netcool(R) software suite provides businesses with the assurance that their networks, services and applications are working. By allowing our customers to see what's happening throughout the infrastructure in realtime, Netcool applications enable them to respond to problems before they cause network-based business services to go down.