The Japanese subsidiary of Object Design Inc was set up in December 1991 through the initiative of current representative director of the Object Design Japan Co. Ltd, Mike Verretto, a youngish Japan hand who approached Object Design’s top management with the proposal. Given the size of the company at that time – it was doing just $2m a year turnover, it was a bold step but one that has more than paid off, says Verretto. Object Design now claims to have 43% – on 1994 figures, of the market for object-oriented products in Japan, and is the only company in the industry with its own Japanese subsidiary. The two – a Japanese subsidiary and commitment to the Japanese market, and market share – go hand in hand, says Verretto, who emphasises the considerable consultancy – hand-holding – that is required to get companies actually to use object-oriented products. Echoing the impressions of Matisse’s Juvanon, he says that getting the first licence into the company is not difficult, but persuading the company to go beyond that and develop production systems takes longer. Object Design has between 250 and 300 sites using ObjectStore; most of these have been sold through three value-added resellers: Toyo Information Systems Ltd, Mitsui Shipbuilding & Engineering Co and IBM Japan Ltd. It also has two Solutions Partners: Nippon Steel Co’s E&N Division and NK Exa, Nippon Mining Co’s systems integration group, which supports companies such as Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. The largest and, in business terms, most advanced user is the Japanese electronics design automation software developer Zuken Ltd, whose latest product family CR-5000 is based on ObjectStore. Run-time revenues are just beginning to kick in, said Verretto. In Japan the competition for ObjectStore is from other object-oriented products, primarily now Objectivity, said Verretto, thanks to the energy the Objectivity distributor, OGIS Research, the Osaka Gas software sales subsidiary, is putting into sales. OGIS is developing into a formidable competitor with a complete range of products, including in addition to Objectivity, development and analysis tools such as Rational Rose from Rational Software Corp, class library tool Galaxy from Visix Software Inc, and development environments such as VisualWorks and Forte.
Teller machines
Previously Versant, distributed by Nichimen Data Systems, was the main competitor, but Verretto said he was surprised that Nichimen did not even exhibit Versant at Object World. (Nichimen in response says that in the past five years it has garnered a considerable user base – over 200 sites – for Versant, and its current positioning of the product is more as a network management system for telecommunications suppliers rather than as a pure object-oriented database. For example both Fujitsu Ltd and Hitachi Ltd have incorporated Versant in their software for telecommunications products such as automatic teller machines. For the future, Object Design plans to focus on the finance industry as a key market. Software for handling derivatives sales is especially suited to ObjectStore and Object Design has seen some big initial successes in that market, so much so that Verretto was inspired to hire his new sales manager – a woman, even – from the finance sector. He also plans to capitalise on what he sees as ObjectStore’s two major strengths, its close affinity to C++ and high performance ratings compared with similar client-centric applications in both finance and telecommunications, and to expand consultancy as the means of ensuring that his object-oriented products get into the mainstream of Japanese corporate software usage.
