RiverMuse Emerging from Stealth Mode

This open source start up is unveiling their exciting message and pre-release web site for what could be an industry changing tipping point that firmly places open source as a viable alternative to the “Big4” and the “Other 6” within any sized company in any industry.

RiverMuse has launched their website and has plans for initial software availability in early November. RiverMuse (Riversoft and Micromuse) is the brainchild of the founders of the Micromuse and the industry recognized Netcool/OMNIbus solution.

• Chief Science Officer: Philip Tee – Co-Founder of Micromuse/CTO, Founder of RiverSoft/CTO & Chairman, Early software designer Avantgarde (Boole & Babbage/BMC Event Manager)
• Chief Technology Officer: Predrag [Fred] Mutavdzic – Architect Netcool Mediation Technologies, Micromuse
• Executive Director: Mike Silvey – Co-Founder of Micromuse/SVP Marketing and Business Development, VP Business Development and Marketing at RiverSoft.

Here’s a snip from their website – clearly positioning their product at those who’ve made significant investments in or are considering Netcool/OMNIbus technology with promises of a brighter future, improved architecture and a roadmap that if delivered would easily place this open source alternative in the leader’s quadrant of any analyst’s market assessment.

Their plans for putting the administrators first is AWESOME. They get the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) issue with the Big4 and Other6. They’re putting that first OVER any current buzzword bingo (ITIL, ISM, SOA, Green, and yes even BSM – Mike and I need to have more heart to heart talks on that!). Run the numbers in any decent sized monitoring shop and look at the staff and maintenance costs (HW and SW) and you’ll see that something has to be done in the next decade of IT management and monitoring. Do more with less, smarter, cheaper (free) tools, products and solutions as a competitive differentiator (and job security).

That is, if they can deliver. Some that I’ve talked to advised me that “they’d believe it when they see it”. I spoke with Mike a couple months back and took away the sense of a solid vision and plan to execute against. I’d love to hear about some big wins, replacements or other success (benchmarks against Netcool/OMNIbus, OpenNMS, HPOV, EMC/SMARTS, BMC, etc.). I’ve signed up for the software and look forward to kicking the tires!

RiverMuse for IBM Tivoli Netcool Owners

(IBM Tivoli Netcool Omnibus / Micromuse Netcool Omnibus, Cisco InfoCenter)

What a great product – we think so, we originally conceived, designed and built Netcool as an antidote to the offerings of the day. However, we never finished it and, neither did the people who inherited Micromuse after we left, nor have [or will] IBM. The issue is Netcool’s discombobulated configuration methods that lead to an ownership Tax on you, the customer.

Although Netcool is undoubtedly the best-of-the-best Legacy Event Management system, having invented:

* the Exclusive event paradigm
* automatic repeat filtering ‘de-duplication’
* drag and drop correlation, and
* simplified event enrichment

Netcool hobbles around on a major Achilles Heel. Namely, the more filtering and correlation, the more embedded complexity in the platform since Netcool has three different configuration programming languages that have no configuration integrity. Consequently, the more you use Netcool the higher the Total Cost of Ownership gets.

RiverMuse offers the same out of the box functionality as Netcool, however with a thoroughly modern architecture, configuration is easier to perform and maintain offering a significantly lower total cost of ownership. Oh, and did we tell you the core RiverMuse FreeCool is free?

RiverMuse will gradually introduce migration tools for Netcool customers, initially we’ll enable our customers to consuming Netcool Probe events, and in the future, RiverMuse will launch a ‘Netcool Configuration Conversion’ tool to simplify migrations of Probe Rules and ObjectServer Triggers and Actions.