INTERCONNECTS

PALO ALTO, CA -- Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) and IBM (NYSE: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(TM) 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. "Agilent has chosen rock-solid infrastructure technology for data integration to anchor its new informatics solution," said Dr. Caroline Kovac, general manager, IBM Life Sciences. "This agreement, an important first step in an ongoing collaboration, will bring new efficiencies to lab environments, where there is a continuous flow of new data from experiments and instrumentation. The combined Synapsia and DiscoveryLink offering gives researchers a powerful tool to capture and transform raw data from every research process into valuable knowledge that can be used for scientific discovery. "