Technology entrepreneur and EDS Corp founder Ross Perot is forming a joint venture with Masayoshi Son, president and founder of Soft Bank Corp, to service the Japanese systems integration market. Perot Systems Corp has invested the equivalent of $1.3m for a 35% stake in a new Soft Bank subsidiary devoted to the integration service. Systems integration is a very immature industry in Japan and Japanese companies do not appear to be making efforts to develop it, so several US companies are hoping to make a killing. One of the reasons why systems integration has yet to take off in Japan is because the data communications industry in Japan is not as developed as that in the West. Soft Bank has already established a 100%-owned subsidiary called System Bank to work on developing networking software for linking mainframes and smaller computers (CI No 1,460). Soft Bank is also a key investor in Novell Japan with a 33% stake. Meanwhile the Perot Group took equity last year in Unix networking company Atlantix Corp, Bota Baton, Florida.
