Sunnyvale, California-based Fujitsu Software has only recently made a push outside its domestic Japanese market. In a recent interview with ComputerWire, head of application integration middleware Robert Sepanloo said the division is targeting $100m revenue from the business in Europe and the US by 2006.
It could be one of the best examples of stealth marketing the industry has seen, because despite Fujitsu Software being relatively unknown in Europe and the US, it has annual sales of $2bn and over 4,000 engineers worldwide. Of those sales, 90% have been in its domestic Japanese market, but since Sepanloo took the reins of the Interstage application integration suite in April 2003, he claims already to have tripled its sales outside of Japan. That’s not bad considering that the company only announced a full suite of products – the Interstage Suite – in October 2003.
While JBoss, IBM, BEA Systems, and Oracle might lead the market worldwide, according to recent market share figures, Fujitsu Software also claims it has the market-leading application server in Japan, with a 33% market share. The company said it is being used by organizations including 25% of the world’s 50 largest corporations to run their global, mission-critical applications and web services.
JBoss’s open source Application Server product is the most popular Java application server, ahead of competing offerings from IBM, BEA, and Oracle, according to a recent survey from BZ Research, which is owned by BZ Media. JBoss’s JBoss AS was the application server of choice for 33.9% of the 759 development managers surveyed in 2004, up from 27% in 2003, according to BZ Research’s Fourth Annual Java Use and Awareness Study. That put it ahead of IBM’s WebSphere (which slipped to 32.9% in 2004 from 40% in 2003), BEA WebLogic (down to 27.9% from 35%), and Oracle Application Server (down to 21.4% from 29%).
As for its latest version of Interstage Application Server, Fujitsu Software said new multi-server management provides unified operations and administration across entire server farms from a single console. There is improved provisioning support; an enhanced management console; new web, EJB and web services modeling capabilities; support for J2SE 1.3.1 and 1.4.2; and out-of-the-box support for multiple mobile protocols, including i-mode, WAP, J-Sky, EZWeb, PocketPC, and i-application.
