Cassatt, Ascential team up

Silicon Valley start-up company Cassatt and data integrator Ascential announced plans to offer a combined package of software for enterprise data management.

"Information sharing has to be scalable," said Mark Forman, Cassatt executive vice president and former Office of Management and Budget administrator for e-government and information technology.

Cassatt software allows a large number of commodity IT servers to focus on data storage and network needs. The recent computing trend favors a network of Linux-based commodity servers rather than single high-priced hardware systems, Forman added. "Wall Street overnight moved from Solaris and Unix to Linux," he said while making a presentation in Washington, D.C., Feb. 17.

Software-enabled grid computing allows customers to take advantage of better data management solutions, Ascential officials said. The company creates software for the automatic or manual association of data elements based on probabilistic match technology originating from the Census Bureau, said Bill Smith, Ascential's federal division director.

The companies develop and sell their software independently, but it's just a matter of time until they more closely integrate their applications, Smith added.

The partnership is not a merger, and Forman said he has no plans to return to Washington.