Ascential Software Emphasizes Importance of Data Profiling and Data Quality to Enterprise Data Integration Success and Business Value -- Ascential Software Corporation, the enterprise data integration leader, announced today that its data quality technology has been rated Positive by Gartner as of March 2004. Gartner includes data profiling technology in the data quality category. Ascential Software products evaluated in the report published last month are Ascential ProfileStage for data discovery and source system analysis, and Ascential QualityStage(TM) for data cleansing and matching using a probabilistic approach. More than 650 enterprises worldwide use Ascential QualityStage, including Edward Jones, Jenny Craig, NSTAR Electric and Premera Blue Cross. In MarketScope: Data Quality Technology (March 9, 2004), authored by Ted Friedman, principal analyst, Business Intelligence Infrastructure Team, Ascential Software is rated as Positive in the data quality market(1). According to Gartner, vendors with a Positive rating demonstrate strength in specific areas, but are largely opportunistic. Gartner states that customers of these vendors should continue incremental investments and potential customers should put this vendor on a shortlist of tactical alternatives. The report states: "Although data quality is a business issue, technology can be a critical component in the success of data quality initiatives. Enterprises investing in data quality technology (and independent software vendors seeking to partner with vendors in this market) need to be aware of the size and reach of various vendors, and key differences in their capabilities across a range of data quality problems." Gartner characterizes the data quality market outlook as "promising," noting increased interest from large enterprises, balanced against the small size and limited scope of most of the vendors (referenced in the report). However, Gartner also indicates that several vendors are expanding into areas of non-customer data and data quality analysis. "Data quality has a direct and profound effect on the business value of information technology. Poor data quality will undermine IT initiatives and business processes, such as the deployment of enterprise business software, customer service, fraud detection and regulatory compliance, procurement, and marketing," said Mark Register, chief marketing officer and vice president, marketing, industry solutions and global alliances for Ascential Software. "Data quality management is complex and never-ending, but it absolutely must be addressed. And it goes far beyond simple name and address matching. The Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite is a complete data integration solution that provides pervasive, one-of-a-kind data quality and data profiling capabilities to maximize the strategic value of our software." "A key competitive advantage of Ascential QualityStage is its unique probabilistic matching technology that delivers a marked match rate improvement versus the deterministic approach used by other data quality offerings," said Robert Rich, product marketing manager for Ascential Software data profiling and data quality solutions. "When an organization is dealing with millions of records, as many of our customers are, a 3 to 4 percent better match rate yields a significant number of records. Multiply this number by lost opportunity costs, for one example, and the benefit of the incremental performance advantage of probabilistic matching becomes glaringly apparent." Ascential ProfileStage and Ascential QualityStage are part of the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite(TM), the only complete single-vendor solution containing data profiling, data quality, and data transformation on a service platform that includes a parallel execution engine and meta data management. Live demonstrations of the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite and Ascential Real-Time Integration Services(TM) are available at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, March 28 - April 1, 2004 in San Diego. Ascential Software is located at Booth 612.