Micromuse Inc., the leading provider of business and service assurance software, today announced that the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), the national library and printed materials repository for France, has deployed the Netcool suite across its enterprise infrastructure to streamline IT management and provide a centralized view of its operations systems. The BnF is renowned for its rich historical collections, as well as, for its modern information technology resources. The BnF is using Netcool enterprise solutions to collect and consolidate event data from across its IT infrastructure, regardless of whether that data is network, security, systems, or applications based. Additionally, the solution allows BnF to effectively monitor and view the entire enterprise infrastructure, including existing tools such as HP OpenView and other third party applications, via one consolidated management dashboard. This allows IT staff to more efficiently address performance and availability issues, such as traffic overloads, before they impact the quality of service to the end user. "The BnF is a public institution that aims to be accessible to all, using the latest approaches and technologies," said Adoté Chilloh, Head of the Support and Production and Deputy Manager of Information Systems at the BnF. "The library's main site is open to the public seven days a week, 11 hours a day, with an average 3,500 visitors a day. Our catalogues and online information system consists of huge databases, a dedicated Gigabit Ethernet backbone, dozens of routers and switches, and hundreds of servers. To ensure the required level of service availability and performance, we needed the ability to pinpoint potential service disruptions before they impact the visitors' experience. The Netcool solution provides a proven and reliable monitoring backbone that ensures BnF's world-class reputation for innovative use of information technology." Netcool is helping BfN manage the availability of the IT systems and applications which support numerous online resources, including a catalogue of over 10 million printed volumes, 350,000 periodical titles, 95,000 digital documents and 250,000 digital still images, plus over 21 million miscellaneous documents and items that are available in specialized collections. The BnF collections are available both onsite in Tolbiac, Paris, and over the Internet to the general public, students and academics. Using a workstation or interactive kiosk, visitors to the BnF can access electronic versions of ancient books, technical or scientific works, multimedia documents, and more. "The BnF has some of the World's largest databases and servers in operation, and the carrier-class scalability of Micromuse's Netcool solution provides BnF with greater control of these resources through more automated management and centralized operations," said Richard Lowe, Micromuse's Senior Vice President, Business Operations for the Europe, Middle East & Africa region. "The Netcool enterprise solution, provides an essential management platform for applications, systems, and servers, and was able to deliver a cost effective solution - the project implementation which started in January 2003 was completed and delivering value by June 2003."