Mathematica Professional 8.0
Connectivity
Mathematica becomes the ultimate nerve center for all your technical computing needs--connecting, controlling, and integrating external data sources, streamed information, and existing systems as if they were built-in functions.
Automated import and export
Mathematica makes the importing and exporting of hundreds of formats seamless, automatically converting data to or from the Mathematica-computable format.
Data component retrieval
Automatically select the type of data to import from a source using data component retrieval. You might pull in just the numbers from the table on a web page by pointing at its URL, or just the metadata from photos in a directory. 
Web-enabled connectivity
Seamlessly install and utilize live web services, or call up data from URLs just as you would from filenames.
Built-in connectivity with databases, languages, and applications
Built into Mathematica is integration with databases, languages, and a range of applications--so you can plug a Mathematica solution into your infrastructure immediately.
Deployment on a wide range of platforms
Mathematica is often the first major application ported to a new platform and is available, fully featured and optimized, for almost all operating systems available today--enabling you to use your machine of choice.
Optimized binary I/O
For fast interactive data transport, Mathematica includes Input/Output tools for binary data.
Work natively with any data
Just one automated step to import your data in hundreds of formats, from files, URLs, or live from databases--all immediately ready for Mathematica analysis. Mathematica's flexible symbolic representation natively supports textual, geometric, image, XML, sound, and many other modern structures, not just numerical matrices--making export as easy as import.