Systems/Enterprise:

INFORMATICA FURTHER EXTENDS GRID CAPABILITIES FOR PowerCenter

Reaffirming its commitment to helping customers leverage the power of on-demand computing in their data integration implementations, Informatica Corp announced a partnership with Cassatt Corp. Now offered as a complement to the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform, Cassatt's Collage software for automating IT operations for on-demand computing can help customers leverage Informatica's industry-leading performance capabilities in a Grid environment at an even lower hardware infrastructure cost.

"PowerCenter is ideally suited for high-performance execution over an adaptive, heterogeneous network of computing resources -- a fact proven on some of the largest-volume implementations in the industry," said James Markarian, chief technology officer and senior vice president at Informatica. "Partnering with Cassatt is a natural move to help customers automate the operation and simplify the management of highly scalable, on-demand computing environments."

A member of the Global Grid Forum since 2003, Informatica actively supports Grid computing as a way to optimize availability and performance while minimizing costs. Informatica PowerCenter offers the unique ability to build an application on one operating system platform and automatically run it on all other supported platforms. PowerCenter's Grid support enables cost savings by harnessing computing resources across the various servers available to the enterprise in order to process massive volumes of data. PowerCenter is leveraged extensively by real-world customers for successful large-scale data integration deployments.

Managing multiple servers as a single system, Cassatt Collage automates the administration of Windows- and Linux-based server pools -- while requiring no modification of applications, operating software, networks or hardware. This can significantly reduce the cost, time to implementation and risks normally associated with large-scale and fast-growing implementations.

"Data integration is a dynamic area that can benefit greatly from the flexibility and cost advantages inherent to Grid computing, and from the improved infrastructure performance and asset utilization provided by Cassatt Collage," said Sunir Kapoor, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of Cassatt Corp. "We look forward to collaborating with Informatica in identifying joint sales opportunities and promoting the powerful synergy of PowerCenter and Collage."