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The Hong Kong Jockey Club hopes its new network management system Netcool, from Micromuse, will  give it a clearer and quicker picture of its entire network. 
The Jockey Club has special networking needs for several reasons, according to Micromuse vice-president for Greater China, David Zhang. Not only must its systems work in real-time to handle the enormous amount of betting but the network is extremely complex. 
 'There are all kinds of betting - internet betting, mobile-phone betting and ATM betting - and it all must be running in real-time.' 
The consequences of not being able to spot a networking problem immediately were made clear to Mr Zhang when his wife was dealing with PCCW over their broadband installation, he said. 
'My wife spent five hours with PCCW people trying to work out why the network did not work at home. She said: 'If you do not fix this today, I'll move to another service provider.' 
'With Micromuse, the problem could have been solved in minutes.' 
In fact, according to Mr Zhang, PCCW became quite taken with the Netcool product. 
'PCCW likes our product so much they are now selling it,' he said. 
Micromuse was founded in London in 1989 and originally worked with British Telecom. 
The manager of IT infrastructure at the Jockey Club, Raymond Ngai Wei-ming, said that Netcool suited the club's complex network. 
'Micromuse is the event manager for the network,' he said. One of the problems at the club is we have rather a lot of older technology that, although it still does the job, can be difficult to manage. 
'We still have a lot of old machines. For example, we are still running Vax VMS.'  The system works on top of Hewlett-Packard's Openview, which the Jockey Club also uses.
'I think they chose us because we can handle the complexity of their network and we can roll  out the solution quickly. The Jockey Club is in a hurry,' Mr Zhang said. 
He said the biggest problem with a system like the Jockey Club's was downtime. Every minute cost it a great deal of money. 
'An hour of downtime, for example, could mean as much as a loss of $20 million. Zero downtime is an ideal situation to work for. 
'The club once had a problem with offsite betting and we were able to find the problem quite quickly,' he said. 
One of the difficulties in looking for problems on a network is the amount of information that is useless. Finding what matters is the key. 
'The biggest challenge is filtering out the junk information. The role of IT is becoming ever more important,' Mr Zhang said. 'When you have a lot of servers and different technologies, you need a solution like ours.' 
Mr Ngai said the value of Netcool was its ability to find problems quickly. 
'In the past we did not have any consolidation of network management. Now we can isolate problems,' he said.  



Network system set to gallop with Micromuse