In financial services, providing real-time access to data is crucial. Toward that end, State Street is also looking at whether to adopt any of the new data warehousing appliances from Oracle, IBM's Netezza and Teradata.

"Some of the real business and operational savings comes from rationalization of data structures and data definitions," Perretta says. "We think that's very important. But it doesn't happen overnight."

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in Network World's Data Center section.