INDUSTRY

Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ:INFA), a leading provider of data integration and business intelligence software, today announced that it has joined the Global Grid Forum (GGF), a 5,000+ member consortium dedicated to researching and implementing grid-computing technology. The GGF membership strengthens Informatica's grid-computing initiative as the company focuses on integrating this technology into its data integration and business intelligence solutions. "The Global Grid Forum is working to establish a firm foundation for current and future grid-computing initiatives around the world," said Steve Crumb, executive director at GGF. "With Informatica's membership, the GGF can benefit from the company's extensive expertise and continue to develop high-quality data integration best practices and standards." "Grid-computing technology can help increase efficiencies and reduce the cost of computing networks by decreasing data-processing time, optimizing resources and distributing workloads," said Sanjay Poonen, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Informatica. "Our membership with the Global Grid Forum enables Informatica to share information and best practices with industry-leading experts in grid computing in order to build upon our current grid capabilities, and help shape grid computing's role in the data integration industry." Grid-computing technology employs groups of locally or remotely networked machines to work together on specific computational projects. Informatica is delivering elements of grid computing in the newest release of its data integration platform, Informatica PowerCenter 7. PowerCenter 7 leverages server-grid technology to optimize costs, increase availability and maximize performance for data integration across heterogeneous servers. GGF is a community-initiated forum comprised of thousands of individual researchers and practitioners working on distributed computing, or "grid" technologies. GGF's primary objective is to accelerate the creation, deployment, and implementation of grid technologies and applications via "best practices" -- technical specifications, user experiences, and implementation guidelines. For more information, see http://www.ggf.org/ .