Data Storage: Archi-Tech Expands
Management Moves”>Management Moves
Corrections or additions?
These articles by Barbara Fox were prepared for the October 10,
2001 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
New in Town: DoubleBridge Technologies
An IT outsourcing provider named DoubleBridge
Technologies has opened a regional office at Washington Park, near the
Princeton Junction train station. Headquartered in Boston, it also has
branch offices in San Francisco, Beijing, and Hong Kong. Globally
there are about 100 workers; here about 12. The company works in
higher education, financial and pharmaceutical, with the Princeton
office focusing on
the last two, and clients include Aventis, Pfizer, Chase Manhattan,
and New York Merchandise.
Why the name? To show that DoubleBridge simultaneously aims to provide
high tech resources to China while making use of cost-effective
resources
offshore. “We try to leverage the technology between the United
States and China,” says George Wu, a co-founder and manager of
this office. “We have a lot of offshore development — 70
employees
in China — but now we have as many Americans working on Chinese
projects as vice versa.”
“If you have the chance to visit China, you will see that it is
not a Communist country any more,” Wu says. “I am a U.S.
citizen
and proud of it.” His father was a mathematics professor in
Beijing,
and his mother was a senior chemical engineer. His wife is a
pharmaceutical
scientist, and they live in Yardley with their preschool son.
As a child, Wu’s imagination was captured by space exploration, and
after he earned a bachelor’s degree from Beijing University, Class
of 1982, he acquired a PhD in space physics from Colorado State
University
in Fort Collins. (The founders of this company include classmates
at Colorado State and friends from Beijing.) But then he went into
a business oriented area: Among his different IT jobs was a position
as New York practice manager at Oracle Corporation.
Among the exciting projects he had at Oracle was a government contract
for digitizing pictures and storing them on the database, which can
be easily searched by relatives or law enforcement officials.
“This
kind of a project, two years ago, I was really proud of. Without the
database support, the search would take two or three days,” he
says. The time frame for a picture search was reduced to 10 minutes,
surely a help to the survivors of September 11.
Wu has been undaunted by the terrorist attacks. “A lot of our
employees are hesitating to travel, and I lost a couple of good
friends
and colleagues, but our employees are working 100 percent,” says
Wu, in a telephone interview after a trip to Hong Kong on September
20. “These are tough times. We want to concentrate on work and
make sure that, as America, we do the best we can to prove to the
world that United States is a great nation. Some people are working
to midnight to finish projects.”
DoubleBridge Technologies Inc., 14 Washington Road,Building 2, Princeton Junction 08550. George Wu. 609-716-9001; fax,609-716-9002. Home page: www.doublebridge.comTop Of PageData Storage: Archi-Tech ExpandsAs the pharma world gets more high tech, it accumulatesmore and more information that needs to be stored in databases forimmediate access. Whereas Oracle has a generalized database software,Archi-Tech Systems has customized software for the pharmaceuticalindustry, and it is currently doing business with 18 pharmaceuticalcompanies.Archi-Tech Systems is tripling its space, leaving 3,500 square feetat Bear Tavern Road for 11,000 feet at 101 Silvia Street in EwingCommerce Park. Tom Romano of Insignia ESG and Buschman Partners helpedRuth Bell, the company’s administrator, find the space, and Mark Hillrepresented Hilton Realty. The move is planned for November 1.This technology company has pharmaceuticals as its chief clients,and it is flourishing. Archi-Tech Systems has 25 people now and ishiring senior level programmers with expertise in C, C ++ and VB.”We’ve been working in the pharmaceutical industry for nine yearsnow, and people are recognizing what the technology does for them,solving problems they can’t solve in other ways, with alternativesto traditional data warehousing approaches,” says Paul Gray,founderand president. “Data warehousing doesn’t work as well as peoplethought it would. Very few of our clients have been successful datawarehousers.”Archi-Tech Systems employs “thin client technology.” Unlikemainframe technology with dumb terminals, it is network-based andcan run any Windows application. In DVD and hard-disk based versions,it can take voluminous amounts of data. “Over the last four yearsthe data volumes have been getting larger and larger,” says Gray.”We used to think one or two gigs were big. Now we are workingwith a client who has given us 300 gigabits of data.”Archi-Tech Systems started out focusing on thetechnologybut has moved toward the “business solutions” end of thesoftwarespectrum. “Our approach is not so much what technology we have,as focusing on what kind of business problem you are trying tosolve,”says Gray. But as a result of this focus he has parted company withhis founding partner, Mark Fischer, who left and took the aeronauticalpart of the part of the business — compressing aircraft accidentand pilot registration reports for the federal government — withhim.”We have rewritten our core technologies completely,” saysGray, “and invested a lot in R&D. We have new releases of thedatabase engines we use.” Gray has branched out into other productlines, including producing direct field reports to evaluatesalespeople.”Since we end up working with all that data, and since we havethe distribution channel set up, it doesn’t make sense for anothervendor to do all that processing work as well.”Gray’s father, an international marketing manager for Sperry Univac,used to market publishing systems, and Gray spent the first 10 yearsof his career doing database publishing. He majored in business andeconomics at Lehigh, Class of 1980, and opened the business in 1993.Gordon Filepas has joined Gray as a partner.”We’re a growing company in an interesting business andmarketplace.With pharmaceutical clients we are relatively unaffected byevents,”says Gray, “though the mergers do have an impact.”Archi-Tech Systems Inc., 850 Bear Tavern Road,Suite 206, West Trenton 08628-8187. Paul Gray, president.609-882-2447;fax, 609-882-8187. Home page: www.archi-tech.comTop Of PageNew in PRHodes Shaw Bodman Gluck, 196 West State Street,Trenton 08608-1104. 609-392-8383 or 393-7799; fax, 609-392-3428.As of January 1, Judy Shaw and Hazel Gluck will joinHarold Hodes and Roger Bodman at 196 West State Street in Trenton,moving from the GluckShaw Group offices on Riverview Plaza. Hodesand Bodman’s company was called Public Strategies/Impact LLC and itconcentrated on association management. Gluck and Shaw did publicand government relations. These two companies rank in slots two andthree in governmental relations, according to a spokesperson.The firm will be associated with DKB and Partners Inc. in Morristown,a large advertising, public relations, and interactive agency. Inall aspects of its work it will focus on regulatory and legislativeaffairs.Top Of PageManagement Moves”>Management MovesSiemens Corporate Research Inc., 755 College Road,Princeton Forrestal Center, Princeton 08540. 609-734-6500; fax,609-734-6565.Home page: www.scr.siemens.comNorbert Gaus has replaced Thomas Grandke as presidentand CEO of this Siemens Corporate Research. This Siemens facilitydoes exploratory and applied research in software engineering,imaging/opticaldata processing, and learning systems. After 4 1/2 years in that slot,Grandke is going to head the materials and manufacturing divisionof Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) in Munich.Baus has been head of CT’s Information and Communication’s and seniorvice president at Siemens Information and Communication Networks(ICN),also in Munich. Most recently, he was in senior vice president ofCable TV Network Solutions at ICN. His PhD in electrical engineeringis from the Technical University of Bochum, Germany.Princeton University Center for Human Values,PrincetonUniversity, Louis Marx Hall, Princeton 08544-1006. Stephen Macedo,director. 609-258-4798; fax, 609-258-2729. Home page:www.princeton.edu/values3DStephen Macedo is the new director of the Center for Human Values.A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he has master’s degreesfrom the London School of Economics, Oxford University, and PrincetonUniversity, and a PhD from Princeton. Among his books are”Diversityand Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy,””TheNew Right v. the Constitution,” and “Liberal Virtues:Citizenship,Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism.” He came tothe center two years ago as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorof Politics and founding director of the university’s Program in Lawand Public Affairs. The center’s former director, Amy Gutmann, isnow the university’s second ranking officer, the provost.Top Of PageDeathsJoseph M. “Mickey” Stavola, 58, on October 1.He was president and CEO of Trap Rock Industries in Kingston.Frank Wesley Gale, 59, on October 7. The former directorof purchasing at Educational Testing Service, he retired in 1997 after35 years with the organization.Previous StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
