Briefs

Acero Unveils First "Science-Intelligent" Enterprise Software Platform To Unify Drug Discovery

BOSTON, MASS (BIOITWORLD CONFERENCE), March 12, 2002 - Acero, a new company with roots in enterprise software and life sciences, today announced market availability of the industry's first "science-intelligent"( enterprise software platform. Designed to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies unify the drug discovery process, Acero's Genomics Knowledge Platform intelligently integrates data, applications and researchers, eliminating the computational barriers that currently exist in life-sciences knowledge discovery.

Acero's Genomics Knowledge Platform is a distributed software infrastructure that addresses the challenge that has plagued genomics-based research: how to deal with the complexity, diversity and volume of data. Industry research firm IDC estimates that life-sciences companies will invest $11 billion in information technologies by 2004 and according to UBS Warburg, "the effective integration and use of all available data will become the biggest differentiator in the success and failure of drug discovery efforts."

Acero platform includes: � Text Search Engine that performs searches against all objects in the Biological Object Model � Job Controller that enables the researcher to define and run jobs � Parallel Processing Center (optional) to manage the distribution of resource-intensive jobs across a cluster of servers � An optional Desktop Developers Kit for rapidly developing new applications

For more information see www.acero.com.