AspenTech Announces that BASF is First Customer to Deploy aspenONE Using Microsoft Application Virtualization Technology

-The World’s Leading Chemical Company and Long-Time Customer Uses Virtualization to Shorten Deployment Time and Accelerate Cost Savings and Performance Improvements from aspenONE-

Reading, UK: 3 November 2008 - Aspen Technology, Inc. today announces that the first deployment of aspenONE using Microsoft Application Virtualization was completed by long-time customer BASF.

The world’s leading chemical company used Microsoft virtualisation to accelerate how quickly its worldwide process engineering team can begin using and realising value from new releases and updates to the aspenONE Process Engineering suite.

BASF engineers throughout the world have used aspenONE for years to quickly create higher quality process modeling simulations, costing and sizing activities, which improves plant design and optimises production.

Now, BASF can achieve additional IT and operational cost savings and faster performance improvements, leveraging Microsoft Application Virtualization.

Microsoft’s virtualisation technology decouples applications from operating systems and runs software as network services, making applications available whenever and wherever they are needed even when disconnected from the network.

Supporting Quotes:
Peter Michael Gress, Senior Vice President of Engineering at BASF
“We run some of the largest and most complex process simulations in the chemical industry, which makes it essential to have the right IT infrastructure and applications in place.  BASF relies on AspenTech’s aspenONE Process Engineering suite to develop and run world-class operations.  By virtualising the solution, we can more quickly gain insights into plant and equipment behavior to optimise decision making, reduce capital and operating costs, increase engineering efficiency and quality, and accelerate time-to-market.”

Chris Colyer, Microsoft Director of Worldwide Manufacturing Operations
“Our partnership with AspenTech has helped BASF address their enterprise IT challenge of ensuring optimal software performance for their process engineers world-wide.  By virtualising the deployment of the aspenONE suite at BASF we have helped AspenTech and BASF IT Services increase the speed of deployment of aspenONE by more than 50 percent, while reducing software conflicts and risk associated with migrating to new versions.”

Blair Wheeler, Senior Vice President, Marketing, AspenTech
“This initiative reinforces AspenTech’s commitment to make our software easier to deploy and use across the enterprise.  The world’s leading process manufacturing companies rely on the powerful optimisation functionality of aspenONE, and our partnership with Microsoft enables us to deliver more value to industry-leading manufacturers such as BASF.”

Supporting Resources:
- To view BASF engineers discuss how the aspenONE Process Engineering solution helps optimise their plant designs and production processes, go to:
http://www.aspentech.com/corporate/customervideos.cfm?customerVideo=basf

- To learn how virtualisation of aspenONE accelerated how quickly BASF’s engineers  began using and realising value and improved ROI from the aspenONE, go to:
http://www.aspentech.com/case_files/BASF_Case_study.pdf

- To learn about the aspenONE Process Engineering solution, go to:
http://www.aspentech.com/solutions/industry_solutions/chemicals/aspenone_process_engineering.cfm

- To view the press release announcing how the latest version of aspenONE uses Microsoft technologies for faster deployment of enterprise software for process manufacturers, go to: http://www.aspentech.com/publication_files/azpn_pr_41508.pdf