BACKGROUNDER

RiverMuse
Driving Disruptive Innovation in IT Event and Fault Management

RIVERMUSE HISTORY Industry Background

20 years ago, the team of serial inventor and As underlying technology infrastructure is transformed, the associated
entrepreneur Phil Tee, business whiz and management systems must evolve too - if they have to maintain the same level
agitator Mike Silvey, and software engineering
of visibility and control. Without such congruent change, management systems
guru, Fred Mutavdzic – recognized the need for
run the risk of quickly becoming obsolete. For one, the logic of their underlying
disruptive innovation. In the face of overarching
complex business rules no longer applies. When this happens, industry
technology transformation to packet switched
networks and the Internet, they literally invented
incumbents are open to disruptive innovation from new players with modern
the Event Management and Correlation industry architectures that can meet evolving market needs.
as we know it today - founding Micromuse,
With the mainstream adoption of dynamic IT infrastructures at all levels of the
and later Riversoft. In fact, their inventions are
technology stack including virtualization, modular web services and integrated
used to manage a majority of current public and
hardware – another such transformative shift in technology is underway. Legacy
private IT infrastructures around the world as
part of IBM, HP and Cisco offerings.
IT management architectures developed during the last iteration are unable
to meet the order of magnitude increase in complexity. Their crippling lack of
Now this team, together with long time client
automated change management capability, prohibitive cost of operation, failure
collaborator Phil Blades, has done it again
to keep pace with rapid new infrastructure roll-outs, and restrictive business
at RiverMuse – building a new IT Event
models that lock-in customers to proprietary vendor systems - are heightening
Management architecture for managing agile
infrastructures. end user dissatisfaction and driving their rapid obsolescence.

Introducing RiverMuse
RiverMuse has built the next generation Event Management platform for agile
“Having examined the infrastructures that is driving disruptive innovation into the current state of event
RiverMuse solution management technology and processes. This is shaped by three core guiding
principles -
in detail I believe it is
destined to be the next t
An open source community-driven development model where practitioners
leader in network and and customers contribute ideas, techniques and code for the betterment of
event and fault management
system management.
It picks up from where t
Fundamental innovation in the architecture and business processes of event
Micromuse left off several and fault management that results in dramatic simplifications and reduction
of the cost of ownership
years ago, taking the
solution to a whole new t
A clear focus on building a ‘change ready’ event and fault management
level.” platform that can meet the needs of dynamic infrastructures of today and into
the future

Con Blackett, Former RiverMuse is led by an experienced team of executives with deep knowledge of
Head of ITSM Operations, the IT Management industry. The company is financed by two premier Silicon
British Telecom Valley firms - Trinity Ventures and Sierra Ventures. It currently has offices in
London, UK and in Silicon Valley, California.
 BACKGROUNDER

New Architecture Components for Disruption

RiverMuse delivers fundamental new innovations in its novel event management architecture:

Two-Tier Data Model

RiverMuse separates events ‘all data’ from alerts ‘timely information’. Fault management alerts are created from certain events, under
conditions prescribed by business logic. By preserving all received events and protecting both event and alert data from changes, and
allowing only additive business logic enable operators and business processes to leverage a richer, historical data set for forensics
and analytics.
In traditional fault management systems, a single events and alerts tier changes mediated content at each step of the process -
eliminating any possibility of subsequent historical analysis.

Business Logic Integrity Protection

Event Management systems typically involve the generation of a large set of business logic rules that are interdependent, and together
constitute a ‘behavior model’. RiverMuse protects the integrity of existing rules by adding new business logic to the content of alert
messages without changing the original.
Traditional fault management systems have business logic that changes the existing content of fault messages. This corrupts the
behavior of inter-dependent rules, which results in events not being processed as intended by the system.

Dynamic Variables in Business Logic

By enabling business logic to contain dynamic variables, RiverMuse ensures that the behavior of generic rules can be adapted and
synchronized with changes from any external data. For instance - RiverMuse can automatically adapt business rules and monitoring
when infrastructure changes are detected.
Traditional fault management systems depend on their own data and any change to the infrastructure requires specific change to the
interdependent layers of business logic. This incurs significant costs of operation and inadequately covers risks of change management.

Centralized Business Logic Management

RiverMuse rules are managed from a central point irrespective of the architectural distribution. This guarantees the consistency and
easy manageability of the business logic throughout the system with a high volume of business rules.
Many legacy systems distribute their rules management without strong integrity protection, leading to inconsistencies, redundancies
and potentially ‘silent failures” that go undetected.

Unified Conditioning Service:

All automations, transpositions, enrichments and correlation rules are applied to a common service layer, using a single business logic
configuration language based on pure ANSI SQL. This radically simplifies customization of the environment, facilitates rule integrity
and greatly streamlines change management.
Legacy fault systems require a variety of proprietary languages and scripting to perform even the most basic business logic
customizations.

Copyright © 2009, RiverMuse Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Legal. Page 2

 BACKGROUNDER

Business Model and Processes for Disruption

Based on its innovative Event management architecture, RiverMuse offers customers a new way of operations management at
dramatically higher efficiencies and lower price points.

Freeing Customers from Vendor lock-in

RiverMuse is fostering an industry community and open source model which ensures that customers are no longer held hostage to
vendor product cycles, their internal feature priorities and speed of execution. For example, when customers need support for less
common equipment and systems not covered by the vendor roadmap, they can source it from community members who may have
already addressed that need. The larger community effort also unlocks a level of innovation and agility in product evolution that cannot
be fulfilled via a proprietary closed source development model – since that is wholly dependent on resource-constrained vendor
internal teams who may not have the cycles to address specific requirements in a timely manner. Closed source projects may also
reach a level of product complexity and maturity where further innovation is stifled, since new changes can put the vendor’s current
revenue at risk.

Open Source Model that Dramatically Lowers Total Cost of Ownership

RiverMuse radically lowers Total Cost of Ownership by 50% or more - including both cost of acquisition and operation of an Event
Management system. Customers ranging from SMB’s to Large Enterprises can avail of a compelling range of choices starting from the
free open source model of the RiverMuse core platform to subscription offerings that package ongoing support and services. With the
transformative simplification and ‘change ready’ automation advantages over traditional Event management systems – RiverMuse’s
cost of operation is a fraction of what enterprises pay today.

Transformative Simplification in Event Management Operations

RiverMuse transforms today’s complex and people-intensive operations processes to one where a single business logic system with
centralized rules that propagate enterprise wide, coupled with dynamic variable driven change management, automatically adjusts
to infrastructure shifts. Whether it’s a new configuration change or an entirely new device that is deployed, RiverMuse aims to check
against a central repository and incorporate the updated business logic describing polling, decoding, alert creation, correlation and
automation for immediate management.

Dynamic Infrastructure Management

Without the level of automation and business logic intelligence described above, it is impossible for operations teams to handle the
massive amounts of configuration and virtualized object changes that happen on a continuous basis. RiverMuse for instance, can easily
link and dynamically synchronize with sources of configuration data in external systems such as CMDB’s. In addition, RiverMuse offers
normalized workflow architecture for easy integration and automation with third party products such as trouble ticketing systems and
audit and compliance tools.

Copyright © 2009, RiverMuse Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Legal. Page 3

 BACKGROUNDER

The RiverMuse Offering

RiverMuse offers a range of choices for customers with capabilities and support options to fulfill the needs of small and large enterprises
and service providers -
t
RiverMuse Core: a free and fully functional open source event and fault management offering under GPL3 that is available for
download at http://www.rivermuse.org.
t
RiverMuse ES: a subscription-based support and service offering around RiverMuse Core that is currently available.
t
RiverMuse Pro: Planned for early 2010, Pro is an advanced subscription-based event and fault management offering that will add
powerful desktop console, reusable and transportable business logic and new object detection and configuration functionality to
RiverMuse Core.

RiverMuse Benefits
The RiverMuse Event Management platform ushers in a new era of disruptive innovation that offers powerful benefits for customers
of all sizes:
t
The only platform in the market that enables full visibility and control of dynamic service delivery infrastructures
t
Fastest time to value of any event and fault management system with out-of-the-box capabilities ensuring rapid results
t
Simplified business logic rules management and automation resulting in dramatically lower cost of platform operation and reduction
in ongoing administrative burden
t
Proactive prevention of false alerts based on automated business rule changes in alignment with the infrastructure shifts
t
Improved mean time to detect and repair problems in a rapidly changing and high volume, virtualized and web services environment
t
Elimination of outages or blind-spots leading to unknown and undetected ‘silent failures’
t
Native multi-tenant architecture that provides secure and personalized visibility to multiple end customers or business units
t
Ease of integration into external systems to facilitate ITIL and eTOM process support
t
Future proof platform that is built ‘change management’ ready from the ground up

London Office About RiverMuse

The Foundry RiverMuse delivers next-generation event and fault management
154-156 Blackfriars Road that uniquely enables IT organizations to maintain the health of their
increasingly complex and adaptive environments so they can optimize
London, SE1 8EN UK
service levels, drive down costs, and respond more nimbly to the
+44 (0)870 141 4514 changing needs of the business. RiverMuse’s open source model allows
the global community of IT professionals to effectively collaborate in order
to fulfill evolving market requirements with new software economics.
Silicon Valley Office
The company was founded by the serial entrepreneurs who launched
2751 Belmont Canyon Road Micromuse and RiverSoft—and whose innovations assure a majority of
Belmont, CA 94002 USA all public and private internet infrastructures in use today.
+1 650 888 1495 For more information, please visit www.rivermuse.com.

Copyright © 2009, RiverMuse Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Legal. Page 4