Company announces plans to bring DATAllegro's enterprise-class data warehousing capabilities to customers, partners in less than 24 months.

REDMOND, Wash., Sept. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microsoft Corp. continues to rapidly expand the capabilities of its data platform and is already revealing product road map details following the acquisition of DATAllegro Inc., a provider of large-volume, high-performance data warehouse appliances. As part of its focus on helping organizations manage and access even the largest quantities of data, Microsoft will offer a new solution based on DATAllegro's technology that extends Microsoft SQL Server to scale into hundreds of terabytes of data. The company will begin giving customers and partners early access to the combined solution through community technology previews (CTPs) within the next 12 months, with full product availability scheduled for the first half of calendar year 2010.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO)

'Microsoft recently launched SQL Server 2008, which is already attracting a great deal of attention thanks to all of the new functionality for mission-critical data management and business intelligence -- in fact, it's been downloaded more than 500,000 times,' said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft. 'These capabilities, combined with DATAllegro's ability to scale to hundreds of terabytes, present an extremely powerful solution set for customers and partners, and we are committed to getting it in their hands as soon as possible.'

'SQL Server has already brought so much value to our organization, whether it's giving us more insight into our data, reducing demands on our hardware or simply speeding up the performance of our applications,' said Ron Van Zanten, directing officer of Business Intelligence, Premier Bankcard Inc. 'Perhaps more important, it's delivered all of these benefits without requiring changes to our existing infrastructure. DATAllegro's technology is a natural complement to SQL Server, so we are excited about the possibilities this acquisition will bring.'

Already a recognized leader in data warehousing and business intelligence (BI), SQL Server 2008 is the only solution in the industry that includes comprehensive, tightly integrated functionality for data management and advanced BI out of the box.