SANTA CLARA, CA -- Focused on helping life sciences companies effectively manage the growing volume and complexity of their data, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced it is teaming with Acero, Inc. to provide a knowledge and data management platform for genomic-based drug discovery. The new Acero Genomics Knowledge Platform running on the Solaris(TM) Operating Environment is designed to integrate and process diverse data on a massive scale, bringing to life the promise of genomics-based drug discovery to both biologists and bioinformaticists. ``We partnered with Sun because of its recognized leadership in and understanding of the challenges and opportunities of the life sciences market,'' said Dave Snyder, chairman and chief executive officer of Acero. ``Working together, Acero and Sun will address the massive data integration, storage and scalability needs of the industry, helping pharmaceutical and biotech companies achieve widespread success from their efforts in genomics.'' Acero, a new company formed from enterprise software provider Secant Technologies and the team of scientists and developers that initiated the Genomics Knowledge Platform at Incyte Genomics, is working closely with Sun to meet the growing data and knowledge management needs of drug discovery companies worldwide. Acero's comprehensive solution helps eliminate the computation- and integration-related barriers that remain a significant challenge for most pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The unique platform integrates vast and diverse volumes of data representing the spectrum of biology and unifies this data in an extensive model of biology. Sun servers provide the reliability, high-performance and massive scalability required to handle the large quantities of diverse scientific data. ``There is increasing pressure on pharmaceutical and biotech companies to make use of their stores of complex genomic and proteomic data. The chief barrier to success lies in the significant data integration and management issues, which continue to plague these companies,'' said Sia Zadeh, Ph.D., group manager, Life Science Group at Sun Microsystems. ``Our relationship with Acero enables us to jointly offer a reliable and scalable platform that will help scientists seamlessly conduct research across multiple scientific domains, thereby increasing R&D productivity and putting drug discovery on the fast track.'' Unlike data integration offerings that do not provide a context for the data that is being integrated, the Genomics Knowledge Platform provides a ``science-intelligent'' solution by unifying data and applications in an extensive model of biology. This biology-specific object model framework models genes, sequences, structures, expression, sample information, pathways, genetics, literature and popular analysis tools that are used to mine the specific domain. Customers, such as drug discovery, biotech and other related genomics organizations, as well as academic and non-profit research centers, can utilize the Sun and Acero solution to eliminate the barriers between data, applications and researchers, allowing them to focus more time and effort on their ultimate goal of drug discovery. Combining Acero's ``science-intelligent'' software platform with Sun's highly available, secure and massively scalable systems, organizations can accomplish the following: -- Intelligent data integration: the solution provides a single point of storage and update for all genomics data, including genes, sequences, structure, genetics, pathways, expression, sample information and literature -- Application development: the Genomic Knowledge Platform's Desktop Developer's Kit and application services can be used to quickly build applications that can access data across the biological domain -- Parallelization of high-throughput tasks: the Parallel Processing Center can use thousands of processors to run complex informatics tools and algorithms For more information visit www.acero.com or www.sun.com