Stories about: Micromuse

OfficeMax had a visibility problem. "Two years ago we started a major third-party drop-ship program that caused us to lose some visibility of the orders after they left our network," says Brian Walmsley, divisional vice president of EAI technology at OfficeMax.

When bit and bytes fly through networks at lightning speeds adding criticality to the triplets of connectivity, continuity and content, intelligent infrastructure keeps trouble at bay. Ian Yates reports.

Technology is too often dismissed as a company cost — yet used wisely it can create business. For service providers, where consumers are demanding faster and cheaper services with richer content, this means juggling service expectations with budgetary constraints

Microsoft Corp. Wednesday unveiled a Web services-based technology intended to allow its Windows-centric management tools to integrate with other platforms such as Linux and Unix.

Opsware Chairman Marc Andreessen has never shied away from the bleeding edge. The creator of Netscape, which was one of the fundamental drivers that helped popularize the Internet, Andreessen has consistently pushed toward that edge and suffered some cuts and bruises but never a critical amount of blood loss.

Pershing has been around since the 1930s and runs one of the biggest financial clearing businesses in the U.S., but the company is little known to many people because it does so much of its work behind the scenes. Sold by Credit Suisse Group to Bank of New York for US$2.1 billion earlier this year, Pershing relies heavily on its network to conduct much of its business, which involves supplying about 250 applications and services to more than 1,300 customers. Ramaswamy Nagappan, Pershing's managing director of e-services, spoke recently about the challenges of running such a huge online applications system.

Service management software maker SMARTS this week released a software tool to help enterprise network managers monitor and maintain security devices across their infrastructure.

Microsoft Corp. Monday released the first service pack and a set of enhancements for its event and performance monitoring tool as it continues its long and convoluted effort to create an enterprise-worthy management platform for the Windows environment.

Microsoft Corp. Monday released the first service pack and a set of enhancements for its event and performance monitoring tool as it continues its long and convoluted effort to create an enterprise-worthy management platform for the Windows environment.

A recent study by Gartner Inc. predicts that the enterprise network management market will undergo some consolidation in the next three years, which might not suit the vendors, but could result in lower price points for software buyers.

Whether in direct correlation to its sparse attendance or to simply cement the understanding that IT budget spending is still under lock and key, attendees at the Network + Interop/Comdex conference this week are expressing a desire to wrest greater value from their existing network products rather than invest in new management and application performance wares.