Micromuse acquisition provides Harmoni

Micromuse, developer of Operations Support System (OSS) software for service providers, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Network Harmoni for $23m.

The cash deal gives Micromuse control over the evolution of Network Harmoni's agent software, which has been used by Micromuse in its Netcool solutions since the companies partnered in April 2002.

Harmoni's intelligent agents are designed to collect data from various points around a network. The data is fed into the various Micromuse application monitoring products to create a real-time model. This information enables Micromuse to provide its service provider customers with information about which specific users will be affected by a particular network outage or damaged system, helping them to meet their service level agreements (SLAs).

Craig Farrell, Network Harmoni's chief executive will immediately take over the chief technology officer's position at Micromuse. The acquisition will also include Harmoni's OpCenter product, which is a centralised IT management and problem resolution system designed for medium-sized enterprises.

Lloyd Carney, Micromuse's chairman and chief executive, said that by owning this combined technology, Micromuse can "help our customers to ensure IT availability, manage their end users' experience, and monitor end-to-end business processes via a single, trusted management platform."

Rusty Sweet, head of network and telecommunication infrastructure services at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said in a statement: "The Netcool suite... provides detailed metrics and status information that allows us to see when a fault is developing and help triage the problem to minimise downtime and maximise application availability."

Sweet claims that over the past year, the hospital's network has achieved "in excess of 99.999 percent availability".