Data Storage: Archi-Tech Expands
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."
Building 2, Princeton Junction 08550. George Wu. 609-716-9001; fax,
609-716-9002. Home page: www.doublebridge.com
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Data Storage: Archi-Tech Expands
As the pharma world gets more high tech, it accumulates
more and more information that needs to be stored in databases for
immediate access. Whereas Oracle has a generalized database software,
Archi-Tech Systems has customized software for the pharmaceutical
industry, and it is currently doing business with 18 pharmaceutical
companies.
Archi-Tech Systems is tripling its space, leaving 3,500 square feet
at Bear Tavern Road for 11,000 feet at 101 Silvia Street in Ewing
Commerce Park. Tom Romano of Insignia ESG and Buschman Partners helped
Ruth Bell, the company’s administrator, find the space, and Mark Hill
represented 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 is
hiring senior level programmers with expertise in C, C ++ and VB.
"We’ve been working in the pharmaceutical industry for nine years
now, and people are recognizing what the technology does for them,
solving problems they can’t solve in other ways, with alternatives
to traditional data warehousing approaches," says Paul Gray,
founder
and president. "Data warehousing doesn’t work as well as people
thought it would. Very few of our clients have been successful data
warehousers."
Archi-Tech Systems employs "thin client technology." Unlike
mainframe technology with dumb terminals, it is network-based and
can run any Windows application. In DVD and hard-disk based versions,
it can take voluminous amounts of data. "Over the last four years
the data volumes have been getting larger and larger," says Gray.
"We used to think one or two gigs were big. Now we are working
with a client who has given us 300 gigabits of data."
Archi-Tech Systems started out focusing on the
technology
but has moved toward the "business solutions" end of the
software
spectrum. "Our approach is not so much what technology we have,
as focusing on what kind of business problem you are trying to
solve,"
says Gray. But as a result of this focus he has parted company with
his founding partner, Mark Fischer, who left and took the aeronautical
part of the part of the business — compressing aircraft accident
and pilot registration reports for the federal government — with
him.
"We have rewritten our core technologies completely," says
Gray, "and invested a lot in R&D. We have new releases of the
database engines we use." Gray has branched out into other product
lines, including producing direct field reports to evaluate
salespeople.
"Since we end up working with all that data, and since we have
the distribution channel set up, it doesn’t make sense for another
vendor 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 years
of his career doing database publishing. He majored in business and
economics 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 and
marketplace.
With pharmaceutical clients we are relatively unaffected by
events,"
says Gray, "though the mergers do have an impact."
Suite 206, West Trenton 08628-8187. Paul Gray, president.
609-882-2447;
fax, 609-882-8187. Home page: www.archi-tech.com
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New in PR
Trenton 08608-1104. 609-392-8383 or 393-7799; fax, 609-392-3428.
As of January 1, Judy Shaw and Hazel Gluck will join
Harold Hodes and Roger Bodman at 196 West State Street in Trenton,
moving from the GluckShaw Group offices on Riverview Plaza. Hodes
and Bodman’s company was called Public Strategies/Impact LLC and it
concentrated on association management. Gluck and Shaw did public
and government relations. These two companies rank in slots two and
three 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. In
all aspects of its work it will focus on regulatory and legislative
affairs.
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Management Moves">Princeton Forrestal Center, Princeton 08540. 609-734-6500; fax,
609-734-6565.
Home page: www.scr.siemens.com
Norbert Gaus has replaced Thomas Grandke as president
and CEO of this Siemens Corporate Research. This Siemens facility
does exploratory and applied research in software engineering,
imaging/optical
data processing, and learning systems. After 4 1/2 years in that slot,
Grandke is going to head the materials and manufacturing division
of Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) in Munich.
Baus has been head of CT’s Information and Communication’s and senior
vice president at Siemens Information and Communication Networks
(ICN),
also in Munich. Most recently, he was in senior vice president of
Cable TV Network Solutions at ICN. His PhD in electrical engineering
is from the Technical University of Bochum, Germany.
Princeton
University, Louis Marx Hall, Princeton 08544-1006. Stephen Macedo,
director. 609-258-4798; fax, 609-258-2729. Home page:
Stephen Macedo is the new director of the Center for Human Values.
A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he has master’s degrees
from the London School of Economics, Oxford University, and Princeton
University, and a PhD from Princeton. Among his books are
"Diversity
and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy,"
"The
New Right v. the Constitution," and "Liberal Virtues:
Citizenship,
Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism." He came to
the center two years ago as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor
of Politics and founding director of the university’s Program in Law
and Public Affairs. The center’s former director, Amy Gutmann, is
now the university’s second ranking officer, the provost.
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Deaths
He was president and CEO of Trap Rock Industries in Kingston.
of purchasing at Educational Testing Service, he retired in 1997 after
35 years with the organization.
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