Micromuse Inc. Monday announced plans to acquire operational support system supplier Lumos Technologies Inc. for approximately $2.7 million.
San Francisco, Calif.-based Micromuse, which provides network fault management for large service providers and enterprise networks, will extend its reach to telecommunications equipment providers with the Lumos acquisition. Lumos, which manages Layer 1 (physical) networks, has licensed its technology to about 100 equipment vendors.
Although Micromuse has worked to reduce its reliance on service provider customers, which comprise 75 percent of its revenues, the move signals the companys commitment to its core customers, according to a company spokeswoman.
Micromuses NetCool/Omnibus network management software provides real-time monitoring of networks primarily at Layer 3, and more recently at Layer 2 with the completed acquisition of Riversoft Inc.
“There is an effort within our space to achieve as much visibility and management capability as possible up and down the layers of the communications stack. Were now moving down to the (physical) transport layer,” said the spokeswoman.
The acquisition, which also calls for Micromuse to take on $800,000 in Lumos outstanding debt, was driven in part by mutual prospective customers and their desire to see greater integration of each companys management software.
The Lumos tools gather, normalize and correlate management data from a variety of network elements. The tools include management agents, configuration management functions and an element manager.
In its integration effort, Micromuse will make it possible for the Lumos tools to forward Transaction Language (TL) 1 event streams into the NetCool platform. Lumos software will act as a collector and concentrator for those event streams. In subsequent integration efforts, Micromuse will tie the Lumos Layer 1 discovery and topology capabilities into its NetCool Precision tool to bring greater visibility into Layer 1 networks.
The acquisition of the privately held firm, based in Santa Monica, Calif., is expected to close by years end. Micromuse will integrate Lumos, which has 35 employees, into its organizational structure.