MICROMUSE AND INFOVISTA TEAM UP TO DELIVER INDUSTRY’S MOST COMPLETE, INTEGRATED SOLUTIONS FOR FAULT, PERFORMANCE

12.10.04

Strategic Alliance Enables Customers of Both Companies to Leverage Best-in-class Technology

SAN FRANCISCO, California, Herndon, Virginia, and PARIS, France – Micromuse Inc. (Nasdaq: MUSE) and InfoVista (Nasdaq:IVTA; Nouveau Marché: FR0004031649), today announced a strategic alliance that enables enterprise and carrier customers of both companies to deploy the industry’s best software solutions for fault, performance, and business service management with minimal integration effort. Micromuse and InfoVista customers around the globe will enjoy the synergistic benefits of pre-integrated solutions that offer realtime fault monitoring and performance analytics, historical trending, business impact analysis, and executive dashboard views.

"As one of the world's leading telecommunications and information technology service providers, we are pleased to see these two leaders come together to enhance the synergy between Micromuse and InfoVista solutions," said Hardy Rehmann, Managing Director with Deutsche Telekom Network Projects and Services. "This relationship completes the OSS platform, providing a bi-directional integration of each company’s solutions, and combines the best of both worlds with fault and performance management. We see this relationship as playing to the strengths of InfoVista and Micromuse and it will enable us to increase efficiency and effectiveness by streamlining service activation and offering next generation services virtually risk-free."

Effective immediately, Micromuse offers InfoVista’s entire line of service aware performance management solutions as the Netcool®/Vista product family. The Netcool®/VistaInsight Solutions, currently available as part of the Netcool/Vista product line, extend the Netcool suite’s capabilities through performance management and reporting for systems and applications, IP Telephony, IP-VPN, and core networks. The Netcool/Vista product family offers realtime analytics and historical trending of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for customer-centric service level management across the business technology infrastructure.

Also effective immediately, InfoVista now offers Micromuse’s entire line of agent software for systems and applications management. Micromuse’s Netcool/System Service Monitors™ and Netcool/Application Service Monitors™ enhance InfoVista’s current product offering by generating realtime health intelligence on critical business applications and providing rich, detailed data on system and application performance. The agents proactively monitor performance thresholds enabling proactive problem resolution and alerting IT operations staff before outages affect users, customers, and revenue.

“We’re delighted to see these two industry leaders join forces,” said Alain Gerset, Vice President for Technology Services, Telecom, Media & Entertainment, Capgemini, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. “For the service provider market, the combined strengths of Micromuse and InfoVista will enable customers to maximize revenue opportunities, control costs, and optimize capital as networks converge. In the enterprise, customers will see that the best fault and performance management solutions in the industry are now integrated to manage their complex IT infrastructures better than ever before. As Micromuse and InfoVista focus on the emerging business service management space, the cross-selling nature of this alliance empowers these two companies with a winning combination of cutting-edge technology and global market reach.”

“InfoVista’s software solutions, which offer the industry’s best customer facing reporting, historical trending, and flexible portal-based presentation of Key Performance Indicators, provide a natural complement to the Netcool suite’s leading fault and realtime business and service assurance software solutions,” said Lloyd Carney, Micromuse Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “We are exceedingly pleased that this strategic alliance with InfoVista enables us to deliver to our customers an unparalleled, tightly integrated software suite that addresses such a broad range of infrastructure management challenges.”

"We are very pleased to engage with Micromuse in this strategic alliance and we are excited about the potential of this relationship since there is a strong affinity between the two companies and complementarities abound," said Gad Tobaly, InfoVista Chief Executive Officer. "We have a shared vision supported by a similar go-to-market strategy, and now InfoVista and Micromuse will jointly leverage their leadership in the service provider market and further enhance and extend their coverage and penetration into the enterprise and outsourcer segments, providing a comprehensive suite of end-to-end service management solutions that will benefit customers worldwide."

About InfoVista
InfoVista enables service providers and enterprises to manage and optimize their IT offerings through service-aware performance management solutions. InfoVista solutions are built on a proven software architecture that collects and analyzes performance information from thousands of IT assets in real time. InfoVista transforms these technology metrics into business relevant, insightful and actionable information. InfoVista calls this transformation, and the resulting actionable information-- Business Technology Intelligence (BTI). Eighty percent of the world's largest service providers as ranked by Fortune®, as well as leading Global 2000 enterprises, have selected InfoVista to maximize the value of their business technology assets. Representative customers include Allstream, Banques Populaires, Banque de France, Broadwing Communications, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Deloitte & Touche, Deutsche Telecom, France Telecom, Savvis Corporation, Singtel, US Cellular and Verio Inc. InfoVista stock is traded on the NASDAQ (IVTA) and the Nouveau Marché (FR0004031649). For more information about the company, please visit www.infovista.com