The agreement enables ASG to enhance its market-leading, integrated Metadata Management solutions with Sypherlink's patent-pending technology, which automates the discovery and analysis of metadata relationships across the organization. Statistics show that the use of this technology reduces the time and effort of data mapping projects from several months to just a few days.

With ASG-Rochade Relationship Harvester, organizations can gain a significantly more in-depth understanding of their data relationships in a much shorter period of time. The result is higher quality of data, better management of metadata, more complete impact analysis, lower cost of implementation and an overall ROI that is realized much sooner than was previously possible.

"ASG is committed to extending its success in the crucial Metadata Management space, and ASG-Rochade Relationship Harvester greatly enhances our offering by improving the time, cost and quality metrics of data discovery, analysis and sharing," said Arthur L. Allen, president and CEO of ASG. "Sypherlink's technology enables ASG clients to more comprehensively understand what data they have, where it is located and how it interrelates across multiple disparate environments."

"ASG is recognized as the leader in metadata repositories, and Sypherlink is very pleased to have been selected to help accelerate ASG's Metadata Management implementations," said James Paat, Sypherlink president and CEO. "Our combined solution enables organizations to understand and manage their data in a more efficient and effective manner."

Among its many features and benefits, ASG-Rochade Relationship Harvester:

• Automates metadata discovery, analysis and mapping, eliminating laborious manual tasks and human errors from data-related initiatives
• Equips data management teams with data integration tools and processes that accelerate the entire project life cycle - discovery, design, development, prototyping, implementation and maintenance
• Facilitates the sequence of events required to move data from original, baseline applications to target applications
• Works with virtually any database, file or application
• Reduces metadata discovery and mapping costs by 50-80 percent

ASG's integrated Metadata Management suite features ASG-Rochade™, which provides a streamlined process for centralizing the management of metadata from a wide variety of sources throughout the enterprise. ASG-Rochade can store, interrelate and disseminate information customized to every user's perspective, and it tracks metadata trails, thus providing metadata configuration management and enabling change impact analysis. ASG-Rochade is complemented by ASG-becubic™, which focuses on technical metadata and application systems. Acquired by ASG in March 2004, the ASG-becubic multi-technology repository achieves a comprehensive view of IT assets, their composition and interrelationships by operating in more than 100 environments, from mainframe to distributed architectures.

About ASG
ASG's business is to partner with clients to improve productivity and significantly enhance performance through the intelligent use of technology. Founded in 1986, ASG is a privately held global enterprise software and professional services firm that provides a full range of software solutions in the Security Management, Applications Management, Operations Management, Information Management, Performance Management and Infrastructure Management arenas - including business re-engineering, systems integration and systems development. ASG has approximately 900 employees, $169 million in annual revenues, 7,000 customer sites and 18,000 software licenses worldwide. ASG is headquartered in Naples, Florida, USA, with more than 45 offices serving the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia/Pacific. Inc. magazine recognized ASG as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, with a three-year growth rate of 394 percent. For more information, visit ASG at www.asg.com.

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant
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