Dead Man Walking (CIC)

I just got back from a nice 3 day trip out to the tech corridor in Virginia.  Very nice trip, met lots of good folks.  As many of you may know, we just hired our new VP of Sales – Bill Cannon.  The trip was great for Bill because it served as validation for the reasons he came to Monolith Software.  Bill got to hear first hand just how positively companies are receiving the Monolith message.  There just isn’t anything quite like us out there in the marketplace today.

One of the most interesting observations for me during our trip related to CIC.  For those of you unfamiliar with CIC, it is the Cisco OEM of Micromuse Netcool.  Cisco called it Cisco Info Center (i.e. CIC).  Cisco started the OEM relationship with Micromuse back in December, 1997, and  initially the partnership had a great deal of focus from Cisco.  They were not just going to simply put their bridge logo on the interface, but were committed to actually adding their value to the product.  They built a development team to put (or try to put) their influences into the product:  the object server was called the info server;  the probes were called mediators.  I recall one of the areas being their “real time trapd mediator”.  Cisco was adding sequence numbers to traps to validate that none were missed.

It all started out so strong.  The market was going crazy during the explosion of dot-com companies.  Everyone was building NOC’s.  People were spending money as if they gotten it out of their Monopoly games.  Micromuse built a significant focus on Cisco and had a teaming arrangement and a generous dual compensation arrangement.  The result was, Cisco reps were starting to talk to their customers about CIC.  Good for the Cisco rep.  Good for Micromuse.

After the IBM acquisition of Micromuse, things started changing.  They had some changes in their product management.  They disbanded their development focus around CIC.  From everything that I have seen, CIC turned into nothing more than an opportunistic sale if Cisco happened to hear a customer was interested in Netcool.  The ones in the know would sell the CIC version and make a good commission.

Fast forward a little to bring us to the present date.  What do CIC customers experience today?  My recent trip illustrated this quite clearly.  Cisco is bringing certain CIC components to an end of life status.  The problem is, trying to figure out what that means is difficult.  In the past, Micromuse Netcool part numbers were mapped to Cisco part numbers.  After the IBM acquisition, all sorts of changes to part numbers, product names, bundles, etc. have occurred, and trying to figure out the impacts for a CIC customer is extremely daunting.  A second big issue CIC shops face is support.  I’ve been told first hand that being a CIC customer forces you to effectively build your own support organization.  You must learn to troubleshoot issues on your own.  Why?  The CIC customer explained it to me this way.  “When you call TAC the first thing you somehow have to get across is that you need support on a software product; not a piece of Cisco hardware.  If you can do that, then you need to explain that this is not actually Cisco developed software, but something OEM’d from IBM (formerly Micromuse).  If you can get that message across, then you might be able to talk to someone who knows what CIC actually is.  Getting answers is still a challenge though.”

If you are a CIC shop, then I’d invite you to reach out to us at Monolith Software.  Not only can we provide you with a much more advanced event management product, but I can assure you when you call support you can actually talk to folks who know and understand the product.  It also doesn’t hurt that we have additional monitoring and management technology that addresses discovery, topology mapping, correlation & root cause analysis, availability & performance monitoring, service level management, real time dashboards and full multi-tenancy support all built on a single code-set.

Don’t forget to ask us about our CIC migration program.

Cheers!

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