Summary

November 18, 2004 - Ascential Software's annual customer event, Ascential World 2004: The Global Data Integration Conference, was held in Las Vegas in late October. Highlighting progress already made on its development roadmap outlined a year ago, Ascential provided a peek at what it calls a "superior customer experience" to improve the out-of-the-box experience. The goal is to alleviate what remains a complex, skills intensive, IT-centric process. With demonstrable evidence of real innovation coming from its development efforts, Ascential is still faced with the challenge of moving a seemingly reluctant market toward accelerated adoption of their newer offerings rather than older versions. Ventana Research recommends organizations take a more focused Integration Management approach, assess hard and soft costs of one-off data integration projects and maintenance tasks and understand how the ongoing data churn below the surface impacts the ability to manage the business.