PALO ALTO, Calif. and SOMERS, N.Y., Aug. 21, 2002 - Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) and IBM today announced an agreement to bring together complementary technologies to create an informatics system designed to help accelerate drug discovery and development.
Through the agreement, the companies will collaborate to make IBM's
DiscoveryLink* data integration technology compatible with the new Agilent Synapsia Informatics Workbench family of software products. Synapsia is designed to help researchers synthesize and share research knowledge.
The combined Agilent and IBM technologies will enable researchers to access and perform queries against a broad range of biological and chemical data from diverse sources and in different types of files and formats, including text, images, numeric files, and relational databases.
"The common goal of this collaboration is to offer solutions that will help researchers design better drugs and get them to market faster," said Chris van Ingen, senior vice president of Agilent's Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis Business. "Researchers need to collaborate throughout the entire discovery process. Agilent and IBM are working together to deliver the critical technologies to help scientists work more productively."
Using DiscoveryLink, researchers can search diverse data sources, such as relational databases -- Oracle** and Sybase** systems, for example -- and public bioinformatics and genomics databases. Through its federated approach to data management, DiscoveryLink can perform complex searches quickly and efficiently, and deliver results in a consolidated, consistent format, while leaving the original data and its underlying structure intact.
About IBM
IBM Life Sciences brings together IBM resources, from research, services and e-business expertise to data and storage management and high-performance computing, to offer new solutions for the life sciences market, including biotechnology, genomic, e-health, pharmaceutical and agri-science industries. The fastest way to get more information about IBM Life Sciences is through its Web site, http://www.ibm.com/lifesciences.
About Agilent Technologies
Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is a global technology leader in communications, electronics and life sciences. The company's 37,000 employees serve customers in more than 120 countries. Agilent had net revenue of $8.4 billion in fiscal year 2001. Information about Agilent is available on the Web at www.agilent.com.
* DiscoveryLink is a trademark of IBM Corporation in the United States
and other countries, or both.
** Indicates trademark or registered trademark of respective companies.
For more information:
IBM Nederland N.V.
Etta Pouw
020 - 513 4228
etta_pouw@nl.ibm.com
Brodeur Worldwide
Tara van Oyen
020 ?346 20 00
t.vanoyen@nl.brodeur.com