"Our customers and collaborators are demanding high-performance computing platform alternatives, improved interoperability with enterprise informatics environments, and medicinal chemistry solutions that are quick to learn and easy to use," said Bryan Koontz, vice president of Marketing for Optive Research. "Our collaboration with Microsoft will add Windows Server 2003 to our list of supported computational chemistry platforms and will lead to significant architectural and user experience improvements in our Benchware(TM) suite of products." Optive's Discovery Engines are scientific programs designed to help computational chemists perform virtual experiments in silico, or "in software," to more accurately model chemical behavior, leading to reduced cycle times and more predictable discovery processes. Software applications in the Discovery Engine suite include such leading products as Concord(TM), DiverseSolutions(TM), ProtoPlex(TM) and EA-Inventor(TM). The companies are currently conducting performance benchmarks for select Discovery Engines on the Windows Server 2003 platform and plan to demonstrate that the operating system is a viable high-performance computing alternative to Linux and IRIX platforms for commercial computer-assisted drug discovery applications. Benchware is a suite of Microsoft Windows-based software applications specifically designed to help medicinal, or "bench" chemists make more intelligent decisions about which chemical compounds to test in actual "wet lab" experiments. Products in the Benchware suite currently include solutions for parallel and combinatorial library enumeration, product-based library design, and chemistry-space visualization. Benchware customers will benefit from an improved user experience that features a redesigned graphical user interface; tighter integration with all the applications, servers, services and solutions in the Microsoft Office System; and an enterprise architecture, based on the .NET Framework, that enhances access to corporate informatics databases, laboratory robots, and other 3rd-party applications. "This collaboration reflects Microsoft's ongoing commitment to the healthcare industry and to our continuing investments in high-performance computing (HPC) solutions for life science research," stated Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president of .NET Business Development with Microsoft. "Our relationship with Optive Research will combine the best in scientific software for molecular discovery with the performance, ease of use and total cost of ownership advantages of Windows to provide a solid platform for research computing." Optive Research was formed in 2002 by respected scientist Prof. Robert S. Pearlman, who twenty-five years ago founded the Laboratory for the Development of Computer-Assisted Drug Discovery Software at the University of Texas at Austin.