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Independent Firm Asks Ascential Expert To Join Growth Panel

Ascential Software Corp announced that its vice president of Advanced Technologies and Product Management, Bob Zurek, will participate in The 2004 Forrester Executive Strategy Forum. The forum will focus on accelerating topline growth and examine the tools, knowledge, and best practices necessary to use technology to speed innovation and win new customers. In addition, executives from Forrester Research Inc will discuss how data integration and other information delivery technologies can enable the development of new information-driven products.

The panel that Zurek is scheduled to speak about, "Right-Time Information Delivery Supports Top-Line Growth," will explore how key issues -- such as a company's sales pipeline, account management, acquisition decisions, and customer retention -- can be positively influenced when targeted information is leveraged at the right moment.

Zurek is responsible for directing Ascential Software's future technology direction, including new product development and technology acquisition. Zurek is instrumental in developing and driving Ascential Software's enterprise data integration strategy.

"Our customers have realized the importance of right-time information delivery to make strategic business decisions. Over the past two years, Ascential Software has been developing our software to operate in a service-oriented architecture (SOA), culminating with the introduction of SOA Editions of all products this month," said Zurek. "The SOA Editions of Ascential DataStage, Ascential DataStage TX, and the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite, allow data integration processes to be quickly published as shared services. I am pleased to be able to discuss our accomplishments and customer successes with peers and other industry experts at a time when data integration requires enterprise-scale, on demand solutions that provide a basis of certainty for making mission critical decisions."

Forrester Research Information Design research group principal analyst, Philip Russom, wrote in the Sept. 3, 2004 report, Data Integration Embraces Services, that "service-oriented data integration has become viable in the past year because it can enable growing practices like composite applications, component reuse, and interoperability between integration silos." Commenting on Ascential Software and its service-oriented architecture, Russom writes that "data integration services in ETL tools today are mainly based on a Web services model and are used to control ETL jobs and data flow. Ascential is an exception, since it also supports EJB and JMS, plus can pass data directly to applications."