In a bid to take a greater share of the market in the Pacific Rim, 3Com Corp of Santa Clara, California has launched its 3+Open Kanji network operating system and announced the opening of two offices, in Taipei, Taiwan and Singapore. 3Com Hong Kong opened last August. According to 3Com, the area has a growing interest in networking which its new offices and product is intended to meet. The company claims that the Kanji system is the only Japaneselanguage local area network manager available, to integrate computing systems worldwide. Customers so far include Nippon Telegraph & Telephone and NEC. NTT will also resell the range of 3Com products with the NTT label to end customers. In Tokyo, 3Com’s year-old joint venture with Soliton Systems KK of Tokyo (3Com-Soliton) is now shipping the 3+Open Kanji local area network manager. Like the 3+Open LAN Manager, the 3+Open Kanji LAN Manager is based on the Microsoft OS/2 LAN Manager, co-developed by 3Com and Microsoft. Because the 3+Open Kanji’s basic design is the same as 3Com’s English-language 3+Open local area network manager product, Englishspeaking and Japanese-speaking employees at multinational companies can operate on the same local area network. 3+Open supports MSDOS, OS/2, Unix and Macintosh environments. 3+Open Kanji LAN Manager also has the same features and functionality as 3Com’s 3+Open LAN Manager release 1.1 with Demand Protocol Architecture. This architecuture’s multiple protocol features enables 3+Open Kanji to support a variety of international computing standards, including the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, Open Systems Interconnect and Xerox Network Services. As well as supporting such Japanese-specific personal computers as the NEC 9800, Fujitsu FMR, IBM PS/55 and PC/AT-compatible AX systems, the Kanji network software works with 3Com’s own workstations and network servers. Development plans include expanding the 3+Open Kanji product line to include a wide range of Kanji-language 3+Open services. These will include electronic mail, software connections to IBM mainframes based on IBM’s Systems Network Architecture Apple Macintosh communications as well as products designed to communicate with geographically distant locations.
