Fujitsu Ltd and London EC1-based Quotient Plc have announced that they are to jointly develop a software applications package for international financial institutions. All of which just goes to show that when it comes to penetrating the Japanese market, putting up with a little pain from the Japanese will pay off. Quotient Plc’s chairman Tim Simon admitted in the summer when Quotient’s end of year results came out that the Japanese office was still loss-making and that the distribution deal with Sumisho Computer Service Corp was slower taking off than had been hoped (CI No 1,492). Now, however, Quotient looks set to win a commanding niche in the Japanese market. The software will be ready by February 1993 and will support cross-border trading, settlement, risk management as well as other operations. The software will run on Fujitsu’s M-Series mainframes, and most of the research and development bill will be footed by Fujitsu. Reuters reports that under the terms of the agreement Quotient may not rewrite the software for any other vendor’s mainframes such as IBM. The minimum cost of installing the software would be about $39,000, with the average cost running at around $56,000. The two firms will initially target about 20 Japanese and 20 Western firms. The London branch of Cosmo Securities is participating in the software development, which involves a team of 12, including three developers from Fujitsu.
