SAN FRANCISCO -- Micromuse Inc. (Nasdaq: MUSE), the leading provider of business and service assurance software, today announced that it has expanded its Netcool® family of solutions to include the management of corporate enterprise and service provider Voice over IP (VoIP) networks. The Netcool for VoIP solution enables the consolidation and management of a wide range of devices, databases, and applications such as routers, legacy PBX, LAN switches and Cisco Call Manager, to ensure the reliability and quality of VoIP services. Netcool for VoIP v1.0 is currently available.

Leveraging the extensibility of the Netcool product family, the Netcool for VoIP solution collects and analyzes information from throughout the IP infrastructure to help operations teams quickly identify the cause of voice quality problems. The solution then helps pinpoint problems allowing organizations to minimize unnecessary alarm escalations and increase mean-time-to-repair and the return on investment of their IP solution.

"The potential spread of Voice over Internet Protocol is a major benefit of the convergence between data and telecommunications and has important implications for vendors and business executives, " stated Stephen Elliot, Senior Analyst, IDC in Network and Service Management. “Centralizing operations and management of legacy and emerging technologies, like Micromuse is doing with Voice over Internet Protocol, can be a critical factor in driving new business initiatives created from operational and technology efficiencies."

Netcool for VoIP provides a centralized view of the network that is focused on the business application and highlights key voice application metrics, such as current calls and active gateways. Leveraging the existing capability of the Netcool suite, the solution addresses the scalability requirements of large and complex networks. The Netcool for VoIP solution provides an exclusive set of business benefits associated with managing today’s IP infrastructures including:

“With a single management console and at a glance view of the end-to-end VoIP environment, the Netcool solution allows executives to quickly assess the overall availability and health of their IP telephony investment,” said Brent Compton, Micromuse’s Vice President of Product Management. “Using customized views based on technology, service, region, or customer, operations teams have the ability to combine the management of their voice and data networks for a holistic view of IP-based service availability and greater cost savings.”

Additionally, Netcool for VoIP provides historical reporting capabilities to enable the analysis of call quality, performance and service level. Analysis provided by Netcool for VoIP reports can also be used to assess network bandwidth for future IP telephony deployments.

The Netcool for VoIP package include the following Netcool products:

Pricing information, analyst and customer references, and screen shots are available upon request. The software runs on Sun Microsystems Solaris, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, IBM AIX, Microsoft Windows XP and Linux

Micromuse Inc.