Claris Corp, the wholly owned software subsidiary of Apple Computer Corp, says that Apple now regards it primarily as a financial asset, and therefore doesn’t worry as sales of Windows applications boom. Windows now accounts for about a third of Claris business, and grew by 52% over the previous year. The FilePro database has come from nowhere to take a 25% market share in the stand-alone PC database space, and now takes second place behind Microsoft’s own Access product in North America and Japan. Claris, which reported fourth quarter revenues up 61% to $91.1m late last month, and annual revenues up 19% to $281.7m, says it will announce profits at the end of the calender year, but says that it’s so far chalked up some 20 consecuitve profitable quarters, a record it thinks few – other than Microsoft – can equal. For the future, it’s planning additions to its two major software lines, ClarisWorks and FilePro, rather than forays into new areas. FileMaker Pro 4.0 and ClarisWorks Office are both newly released, and the company plans to extend ClarisWorks into the educational market with ClarisWorks for Kids. For FilePro, the future holds closer integration with Claris’ Home Page web page development tool, enabling web pages to be dynamically updated from FilePro databases. Higher-end versions of FilePro are also on the way. Claris hasn’t completely forgotton about the Macintosh software market, and is now charged by its parent with the task of distributing MacOS 7.6 and MacOS 8, someting it claims is a profitable business in its own right. To date, Claris has sold 2 million seats – finished goods and volume license sales – of MacOS 8.
