Cassatt, Ascential team up

Silicon Valley start-up company Cassatt and data integrator Ascential announced today they are teaming up 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 is designed to dynamically task a larger number of commodity IT servers for data storage and network needs. The computing trend of recent years is a move away single high-priced hardware systems toward a network UNIX-based commodity servers, Forman added. “Wall Street overnight moved from Solaris and Linux to Unix,” 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 officers state. That 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.

Both companies’ software is currently developed and sold separately, but it is just a matter of time until the two applications are more closely integrated, Smith added.

The partnership is not a merger of any sort and Forman has no plans at all on returning to Washington D.C. as a result, Forman said.