Management from Santa Cruz Operation Inc was on hand in Tokyo last week to explain to the press and Unix distributors about their strategies for the companies in Japan and the revamped Santa Cruz product line. Geoff Seabrook, newly appointed senior vice-president for Asia-Pacific Operations, outlined his plans for Santa Cruz to increase its market share for both the traditional Santa Cruz Unix (OpenServer) line and the newly acquired UnixWare products. In the past in Japan, personal computer Unix did not sell well: in particular the Santa Cruz brand of personal computer Unix, which was initially handled through partner NEC Corp and sold mainly into research labs rather than to the traditional small and medium business market which was Santa Cruz’s domain in other countries. Seabrook comes from the European sphere of operations of Santa Cruz, and having played a role in the Unix acquisition, he will continue his Janus-like responsibilities looking after both Europe and Asia. Asia Pacific includes China, Australasia, Korea, Singapore and other East Asian countries. Two key areas will be emphasized: improving the support available for technology partners and beefing up the channel partner infrastructure. To this end Santa Cruz will run with a two-prong strategy, handled by separate companies which nonetheless share office space. Both companies will report to Seabrook directly. A new company, Nippon Santa Cruz Ltd, has been established with the technical team of 10 people which Santa Cruz inherited from Novell Inc and has been together since the days of Unix System Labs Pacific. The company is headed by Jiro Monden. This company will focus on expanding the market for Unix-based personal computer servers, on working with Hewlett-Packard Co on Unix technology functional requirements for 64-bit Unix and on the Unix System V.4 source code licensing business which carries over from AT&T Corp days. To approach the enterprise space for systems costing under $950,000, a partnership has been formed with Compaq Computer Corp and Oracle Corp to sell UnixWare and Oracle 7 on high-end personal computer servers, the price for which systems, Monden promised, would be more than competitive with Windows NT-based systems, as well as offering extremely high performance. Other systems integrators such as Enicom (the systems integration division of Nippon Steel Corp) are also key partners, along with a new Accell/SQL group and Le Clone PULSE group of five systems integrator companies. Novell had made little progress in developing the sales channels for UnixWare, according to Seabrook. Once Japanization of the OpenServer product is complete, Nippon Santa Cruz will also provide second line support for it as well. The second pillar of the Santa Cruz business in Japan is the joint venture company with trading company Tomen. This company is (confusingly) called Santa Cruz KK (CI No 2,867) and is headed by general manager Andy Suzuki. It has been in existence for two years, its main activity being the sale of Santa Cruz and ex-IXI products such as XVision personal computer XServer product and Premier Motif for Solaris, through Tomen subsidiary Tomen Electronics, to integrators and resellers. Revenue last year was around $10m. Geoff Seabrook is pleased with the achievements of the joint venture, we couldn’t have done it ourselves he said. Name users of applications written for Santa Cruz Unix in the last few years include Bridgestone Japan, Meiji Life Insurance and the Post Office insurance system. Asked about a possible merger between Nippon Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz KK sometime in the future, Seabrook did not rule it out, but he said the structure echoed a similar technical-marketing split in Europe, and since the two shared offices anyway, there would be lots of information sharing.
