Briefs

Ascential™ Software Corporation (NASDAQ: ASCL), the leading
provider of Information Asset Management (IAM) software, today
announced that it has acquired privately held Torrent® Systems,
Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., for $46 million (USD) in cash.

Torrent is a technology leader in highly scalable parallel processing
infrastructure software for the development and execution of data
warehousing, business intelligence and analytical
applications. Parallel processing dramatically improves the
performance of software by simultaneously harnessing the power of
hundreds or thousands of computer processors.

Ascential will immediately incorporate most of Torrent's 60 employees
into its operations and Torrent technology into the Ascential
DataStage® product line.

In further news, Robert L. Utzschneider, founder of Torrent Systems
Inc., has joined the company as executive director of platform
business development. In this role, Mr. Utzschneider is responsible
for establishing Ascential's highly scalable data integration solution
as an industry-standard platform for Original Equipment Manufacturers
(OEMs), including Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and the
company's service and integration partners.

See www.ascential-software.com