Micromuse, maker of fault management software, Friday announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire performance management software vendor Quallaby for about $33 million in cash.

Micromuse, best known for its Netcool suite of products, plans to augment those products with Quallaby's Proviso performance management software to better manage converged IP services across carrier networks. To start, the combined wares will help Micromuse better deliver service assurance management capabilities for service providers responsible for delivering multiple and converged IP services, Micromuse says. In the long term, Micromuse says it will broaden the Quallaby products and offer them to government and financial services customers.

"From a carrier standpoint, this is a slam dunk. This is all we need to deliver converged fault and performance management solutions," said Micromuse Chairman and CEO Lloyd Carney on a conference call. "We identified that we needed to expand our fault management portfolio with solid performance management capabilities. It is without a doubt the most obvious thing we needed to do."

Carney said Quallaby would provide Micromuse with historical reporting that could help customers detect trends and perform predictive analysis. Combining real-time data from Micromuse into a repository with Quallaby data warehousing technology would provide more intelligent analysis than Micromuse could provide today, Carney explained. Rather than embarking on its own development, he said Micromuse would integrate "rather quickly" the Quallaby technology into Micromuse products.

Longtime partners, Micromuse and Quallaby already are integrated within several large service provider networks, including those of BT, France Telecom, Telefonica, Neuf Telecom, Telia Sonera, Completel, and Telecom New Zealand, according to the companies.

The announced merger begs the question of how Micromuse will now rationalize its technology partnership with performance management vendor InfoVista, one analyst says.

"My main question is: Why Quallaby and not InfoVista, as they already had an OEM deal in place? Quallaby has a limited market and customer footprint, but the customers they do have are very large service providers," says Stephen Elliot, a senior analyst with IDC. "Cross-selling opportunities will be limited as most of the customer base already has [Micromuse] technology."