Avaki Announces Avaki Data Grid 4.0, the First Solution to Simplify the Provisioning, Access and Integration of Distributed Data Across the Extended Enterprise.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 29, 2003

Company Offers Industry's Only Enterprise Information Integration Solution Powered by Data Grid Technology

Reduces Cost and Complexity of Accessing Real-Time Relational and Non-Relational Data from Heterogeneous, Distributed Data Sources

Avaki Corporation (www.avaki.com), a leading provider of enterprise information integration (EII) software, today announced the release of Avaki Data Grid 4.0, software that is unique in its ability to help businesses easily provision, access and integrate distributed data from heterogeneous systems in real time within or across organizations. The only data integration software powered by data grid technology, Avaki Data Grid 4.0 dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of data integration while facilitating the best use of information assets and enabling businesses to make faster, more well-informed decisions.

Unlike other solutions that address only a single data integration challenge, and require significant time and capital to deploy and maintain, Avaki Data Grid's distributed grid architecture enables businesses to address a number of data integration challenges across the enterprise while maintaining local control of the data. Avaki Data Grid is the only solution that allows companies to securely share data on a wide area or cross company basis, and enables data integration without the need to write custom connectors, create proprietary data models or conduct extensive programming. Because Avaki Data Grid is built on grid technology, it can scale across the enterprise while allowing administrators and data owners to maintain local control.

"In the EII space, Avaki's Data Grid 4.0 stands out for its ability to handle distributed, remote, and cross-organization interactions with heterogeneous data sources, as well as to create a comprehensive picture of a global enterprise's data automatically" said Wayne Kernochan, managing vice president, Platform Infrastructure, Aberdeen. "This should deliver added value to customers especially in scaling EII across a complex organization, in performing an 'information audit' for strategic use of competitive-advantage proprietary data, and in extending existing 'point' EII solutions across the enterprise, as well as in many standard EII tasks."

Designed to work in tandem with or as an alternative to other data access and integration approaches, Avaki Data Grid reduces the backlog of requests for data while also reducing the infrastructure, programming and maintenance required to access and share real-time information. As a result, businesses reduce the time, costs and complexities of making current, accurate data available to both application developers and end users, regardless of where the data resides. With easier access to data, businesses are able to obtain more accurate business intelligence, collaborate more effectively in research and development, supply chain, and distribution chain environments, and facilitate better data integration for customer-related applications.

A comprehensive solution based on industry standards, Avaki Data Grid enables a single view of any structured or unstructured data - including relational data, files, XML, and application data - from any production data source, while providing security, performance and data integration. Avaki Data Grid's XML support and data flow capabilities enable companies to easily format, aggregate and integrate disparate data.

"Avaki Data Grid 4.0 provides an innovative means to provision, access and integrate distributed data throughout the extended enterprise without having to make data replicas. Other integration approaches require massive development effort, long services engagements and overhead, but still can't scale the way customers need them to," said Tim Yeaton, president of Avaki. "Until now, no one has been able to effectively and securely provision relational, application and file-based data to both developers and end-users over a wide-area and in real-time, and we are already seeing growing customer success as a result."

Avaki Data Grid in Manufacturing, Financial Services and Life Sciences

The new software is ideal for a number of applications over many different industries such as manufacturing, financial services, and life sciences where companies need to access and format information from different systems across diverse groups and locations. Manufacturing organizations can improve their product development processes by sharing and formatting product design and CAE data across multiple groups and engineering organizations. Financial services companies can provision customer data from multiple customer databases to fuel more accurate business intelligence and market analysis. Life science organizations can speed drug discovery and development by sharing genomics, proteomics, and clinical data from many databases and files systems across multiple research groups and partnering companies. Financial services and manufacturing companies can pull together customer information from a variety of databases and files to get a better understanding of market drivers.

Avaki Data Grid 4.0 Simplifies Data Integration

The business problem of gaining access to the most timely, accurate information has been growing for many years. Many businesses now have hundreds of different software applications and data stores in many geographically distributed departments and business units. Getting data out of these systems becomes expensive and complex and new data requests result in bottlenecks and often go unfulfilled. Data is often duplicated and quickly goes out of date, affecting the quality of analysis. Businesses also need to integrate data with R&D partners, suppliers and distributors. Project-oriented data management approaches do not provide a means to control the entire data provisioning process across the organization. Furthermore, business owners often need to obtain data in diverse formats and aggregate data from many different data silos into single views.

Avaki Data Grid 4.0 software provides a comprehensive way to simplify the provisioning, access and integration of distributed data across the enterprise and extended enterprise. Avaki Data Grid meets a variety of data integration needs across large, distributed businesses particularly within life sciences, manufacturing, and financial services industries where real-time data is critical.

-- Provision - Avaki Data Grid provides federated access to

distributed structured and unstructured data across

departments, locations, systems and companies, while leaving

data in place and under the control of local owners. Data

owners securely "publish" files and database queries without

programming and data is made available to others through a

global data catalog. Data owners control access to shared data

in a selective, granular way to ensure security while

leveraging their existing authentication systems. Users and

applications access a locally cached representation of the

live production data without having to create managed replicas

or warehouses while at the same time shielding the production

system from uncontrolled access.

-- Access - Avaki Data Grid provides a single unified view of

distributed data. Users and applications can access data as if

it were local using standard database and file access methods

such as file system access, JDBC, ODBC, and Web services.

Avaki Data Grid makes remote data access practical by caching

data either proactively on a scheduled basis, or only when a

specific data object is requested by a user or application. A

flexible caching infrastructure provides for a variety of

caching strategies for different data objects and performance

needs, enabling organizations to optimize use of storage and

network resources, while ensuring consistency and timeliness

of data. Relational data caching reduces the load on

production databases and administrators while making current

data available transparently to applications and users.

-- Integrate - Avaki Data Grid provides a streamlined,

database-neutral means of integrating data for use across the

enterprise. With Avaki Data Grid, data owners are able to

respond to many different requirements without programming,

and as a result, address new data requests much more quickly

and with less effort. Avaki Data Grid can convert SQL results

to XML documents automatically, enabling automatic

transformation into any structure and format using XSL style

sheets. In addition, data owners can provide data directly to

end-users in simple forms, such as Comma-Separated Value (CSV)

files that can be used directly in spreadsheet software for

business analysis. Companies can also create more complex

transformations and data flows where data from multiple

sources is transformed, aggregated into single views or

integrated to provide the data structure needed by specific

users or applications.

-- Architecture - Avaki Data Grid 4.0 has a unique, distributed

grid architecture that provides flexibility, scalability and

resilience. It enables businesses to provision data across the

enterprise while enabling data owners to control their data

locally.

Packaging, Pricing and Availability

Avaki Data Grid 4.0 is a single software package that includes everything needed to deliver immediate value without the need for separate application servers, database storage, middleware, security software, or administration tools. Available immediately, pricing starts at the workgroup level, and scales for enterprise-wide deployments. More information about Avaki Corporation and its solutions is available on the Web at www.avaki.com.

About Avaki

Avaki Corporation provides enterprise information integration software, powered by data grid technology, that simplifies how businesses provision, access and integrate widely distributed data from many heterogeneous data sources. Avaki enables businesses to use fresher, more accurate data, while reducing the overall cost and complexity of data integration infrastructure, programming and maintenance. Customers such as Pfizer and Aventis are using Avaki software to reduce data integration costs, make fresh data available and improve productivity. Backed by Polaris Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Sofinnova, Avaki is located in Burlington, MA. For more information, please visit www.avaki.com.