CrossZ Software Inc, the ten year-old Uniondale, New York-based former data bureau that finally made it on to Nasdaq last year (CI No 2,291), has decided to do business in future as QueryObject Systems Corp, which will act as a wholly owned subsidiary of CrossZ Software Corp. The firm says the name change marks its transition from bureau service and consulting firm to analytical data mart products company, as it concentrates on selling the QueryObject multidimensional database tool, intended for building sizable data marts taking up very little disk space. Co-founder and chief technical officer Andre Szykier, one of two mathematicians that set up the original company, has now surrounded himself with industry heavyweights from companies such as Cheyenne Software Inc, Cognos Corp and Metaphor Inc, including Alun Kaufman, previously president of worldwide sales at Cheyenne and now president and chief executive officer at QueryObjects. And the company has built up a series of reseller and co-marketing deals with AT&T Istel, Amdahl Corp, Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Pyramid Technology Inc and Brio Technology. QueryObject retains ODBC and OLE/DB interfaces, and runs on IBM MVS, Unix and Windows NT servers and Windows clients, so that that the data mart can be queried form most of the usual analytical and data visualization tools. But in the process of the transition, the company lost its other co-founder, Mark Chroscielewski, who resigned as chairman last week and will leave in May. Chroscielewski was said to be pursuing another business opportunity that includes reselling CrossZ’s software. He is not being replaced immediately. Cross Z posted a net loss of $10.5m for fiscal 1997 earlier this month, but said its results were in line with expectations, and that its product development costs were now largely behind it.
