In Brief

IE Index Informatica IDC reported that Informatica leads data integration, in terms of revenue, by a wide margin. Announced enhancements to the forthcoming 7.0 release of PowerCenter keep it in line with trends: 64-bit CPUs, grid computing, and embedded intelligence (applied to data quality assurance). To top it off, Intelligent Enterprise readers awarded PowerCenter the 2003 Readers' Choice Award for Data Movement & Transformation. Ascential Perhaps it was just bad timing, but Ascential's announcement that its 2004 product strategy will address 64-bit computing and grid computing looked like a "me too" after Informatica. Though both of these close competitors reported a third-quarter loss, Informatica's was a fraction of Ascential's. But Ascential is certainly no slacker. Data integration is a good market to be in, and Gartner recently upgraded Ascential's status in the magic quadrant, for completeness of its vision. The Mercator acquisition increased the company's size significantly. INDEX LEGEND HOT — On the upswing NOT — Possible trouble ahead STATUS QUO — No change

Data Center, Heal Thyself. "Without a standards-based mechanism defining data center relationships, IT operations management will continue to struggle with implementing configuration and change management processes, which will remain very labor intensive," said analyst Donna Scott of Gartner. Her statement supported the announcement that 25 major IT companies had joined forces on a new XML-based standards effort: DCML, the Data Center Markup Language. For more information, see www.dcml.org.

"Byting" Off More Than We Can Chew? Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley claim that in 2002, five exabytes of new information were stored in print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media. To put it in perspective, that's enough data to fill the print collections of the entire Library of Congress half a million times over.

Manufacturing Buys In. The real-time process optimization and training (RPO) software and services market has been sustaining sales, according to a newly revised study from ARC Advisory Group. The overall RPO marketplace consists of three different types of applications: advanced process control (APC), online optimization, and dynamic simulation for training.

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