BMG Entertainment Selects Ascential's DataStage

Ascential Software Inc, a leading provider of Information Asset Management solutions, announced that BMG Entertainment, a division of Bertelsmann AG, has chosen DataStage to deliver comprehensive marketing, sales and distribution data to BMG's North American Marketing, Distribution, Label Management and Field Sales Organizations. BMG will use Ascential DataStage to consolidate information on warehouse shipments, retail sales, and airtime play for more than 9,000 active music titles and deliver that information to hundreds of users across North America. BMG will use this improved business intelligence information and delivery solution to drive enhanced marketing and distribution planning and enable new field-level tactical sales programs.

"Our business units need access to key sales and distribution information to understand market dynamics and achieve their goals of managing business unit projects, improving distribution and increasing sales," said Anthony Marino, director of applications development, BMG Entertainment. "The next generation business intelligence solution that we are currently building will deliver the necessary information to users across BMG Entertainment North America. Our partnership with Ascential is critical to our project, enabling us to leverage our traditional mainframe data sources in new applications and deliver an aggressive program of distributed data marts, based on Ascential meta data capabilities. Ascential has an exceptional track record of providing successful enterprise-scale business intelligence solutions, and we look forward to showcasing this next generation solution to our users and the entire BMG organization."

"Customer relationship management is an important strategic element in any organization's business model and can be particularly challenging when both retail and distributor data is involved," said Mikael Wipperfeld, vice president, marketing, Ascential Software. "By helping organizations such as BMG produce and leverage timely, accurate customer data to deliver increased value to customers, Ascential is clearly demonstrating its leadership position in the Information Asset Management market."

About BMG Entertainment

BMG Entertainment is the global music division of Bertelsmann AG, one of the world's leading media companies, with annual revenues of $17.6 billion. BMG owns more than 200 record labels in 54 countries, including Arista Records, RCA Records and Ariola. As a leader in using the Internet to bring fans closer to their favorite artists, BMG's online presence includes more than 35 wholly owned music & lifestyle Web sites around the world brought together under the click2music.com umbrella. BMG also owns one of the world's largest music publishing companies, and one of the world's leading compact disc and cassette manufacturing companies.

About Ascential

Ascential Software Inc is a leading provider of Information Asset Management solutions to the Global 2000. Customers use Ascential products to turn vast amounts of disparate, unrefined data into reusable information assets that drive business success. Ascential's unique framework for Information Asset Management enables customers to easily collect, validate, organize, administer and deliver information assets to realize more value from their enterprise data, reduce costs and increase profitability. Headquartered in Westboro, Mass., Ascential has offices worldwide and supports more than 1500 customers, including Fujitsu-Siemens; Towers Perrin; Pfizer Inc; BizRate.com and Subaru of America Inc, in such industries as telecommunications, insurance, financial services, healthcare, media/entertainment and retail. Ascential is an independent operating company of Informix Corporation and can be found on the Web at www.ascentialsoftware.com.

Contact Ascential Software, Barbara Petrocelli, 508-366-3888 x3009, barbara.petrocelli@ascentialsoftware.com.