James Stranz

By James Stranz

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James Stranz, information access technology manager for Xerox Corporation.

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© Copyright 2001, EC Media Group, a Thomson Financial company

Having access to vendor consulting horse-power prior to deployment is one of the main ways Xerox Corp. is able to promote data warehousing on a global basis throughout the $18.2 billion company and at the same time maintain a small staff of six to oversee data-access issues , according to Jim Stranz , information access technology manager for Xerox Information Management , the IT arm of Xerox in Rochester , N.Y. We require an educational component from our vendors where they match up their feature set with [ a business unit's ] requirements , Stranz says.On the back end , Xerox data warehouses are built on DB2 from IBM Corp. , in Armonk , N.Y. , or on RDBMS from Oracle Corp. , in Redwood Shores , Calif. On the front end , a growing majority of Xerox groups are working with business intelligence tools from Viador Inc. , of San Mateo , Calif..

Selling solutions is another way data warehousing vendors are satiating customers' support requirements.Instead of marketing proprietary systems that require extensive programming , most vendors are augmenting their data warehouse lines with packaged applications that solve particular business problems.

"Traditionally, information has been generated centrally and disseminated to people, but our people are so dispersed that a portal-type application really made sense," said James Stranz, Xerox's information access technology manager.