ShortList: Profit Optimization; Data Quality

Maxager 7
Maxager believes "margin-only" analysis blinds organizations to actual opportunities for sustained profitability. The company offers profit optimization solutions that bring margin data together with production "velocity" information to help businesses evaluate performance measures such as "profit per minute." Maxager 7 tools then aid in modeling, so that companies can start to control return on assets, the key driver of shareholder value. Founded in 1996, the company cites Dow Chemical as a major customer, along with others involved in complex manufacturing. www.maxager.com

Hyperion System 9 Financial Data Quality Management
Despite the hue and cry over Sarbanes-Oxley, the uncertain quality of financial data remains a "dirty little secret" in many firms. Under pressure to close a quarter, the problem becomes acute: Global organizations must enforce regulatory policies and consolidate data from distributed divisions and supply chain partners. In April, Hyperion acquired UpStream Software, which offered a workflow application to track the movement of financial information from source to report. The company has incorporated UpStream's technology into its Financial Management suite. The functionality also can be applied in corporate tax management, where ensuring data quality is similarly overlooked, expensive and time-consuming. www.hyperion.com

CentraSite 2.1
Fujitsu Software and Software AG teamed up two years ago to build CentraSite, an integrated service-oriented architecture registry and repository. Version 2.1, released in July, introduces a Community Edition that will be bundled by software partners and offered as a free download to end users. Both the Community and Enterprise editions offer UDDI v3.0 search, subscribe and notification capabilities, WebDAV access to the SOA repository, predefined reporting modules, and both an AJAX interface and Eclipse Registry Browser. The Enterprise Edition also provides an extensible metadata model that lets you define custom artifacts. http://www.soaworks.com/

Cast Iron iA3000-SF
Eliminating the development and maintenance requirements of software-based development, Cast Iron says it reduces integration costs by 80 percent by building connectivity, transformation, business logic and management into an appliance. IT staff with basic knowledge integrate systems through a mapping interface. Cast Iron's standard appliance costs $125,000 and maps between unlimited endpoints. The new iA3000-SF is preconfigured for integration with the on-demand Salesforce.com application, and is offered with subscription-based pricing of $3,000 to $7,000 per month, depending on the number of connections to databases and applications. www.castironsys.com