Olivier Juvanon, sales manager at the Japanese office of ADB SA, part of the Euriware software and services group owned by the COGEMA industrial group, is the lone representative of his company in Japan, supporting clients and a potential reseller from a position within shareholder SGN’s Japanese subsidiary. ADB’s parent company, COGEMA, the French nuclear reprocessing company, has supported the development of Matisse, which was used to develop applications such as an archiving database which takes in real-time sensor data. Other mission-critical applications developed with Matisse are in use at France’s utilities such as the Electricite de France electricity utility, Societe Nationale de Chemins de Fer state railways, France Telecom and genome researcher INRIA. Technologically the product has its origins in work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on log files, work that is still the basis of the server end of the product in its high transaction processing character. The client end of the product is based on concepts of semantic networks. Matisse’s strength lies in its suitability for high-end performance, particularly at the server end: in that respect it is classified as a hybrid object database, said Juvanon, and in marketing terms, it competes more with relational databases than with other object-oriented products. Japan is a completely different market from the US, said Juvanon: in the US you have to be the market leader, whereas in Japan many products can co-exist in the market, especially object-oriented products which are completely different from the relational database products. Japan is also a good market because companies are prepared to commit funds to evaluate new products – usually a group of tecchies with advanced skills is in charge – however the decision to implement systems in the mainstream computing area is based on more conservative decision-making and such implementation can take longer. Japan is still under-equipped in databases, so there is room for considerable growth. Perception of Matisse as a French product, and thus something different, can be used to advantage, Juvanon said; however the Japanese focus on the US as the source of advanced high-technology products lingers, since the first sale was made in Japan after the potential client had visited the US and seen the ADB presence there. ADB is trying to redress its lack of visibility in the market, both in Japan and worldwide. Negotiations are currently being concluded with one value-added reseller – Japan Research Institute Ltd – whose channels will be used for approaching specific markets; ADB will sell and support big accounts directly. Further down the track the company expects to set up a Japanese subsidiary, possibly in concert with its reseller. Current users in Japan number 15, and include Japan’s big corporates. The biggest of these is Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, which is currently evaluating object-oriented technology for use in an undisclosed application. Others include Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Tokyo Gas.
