Air Corp, Japanese distributor for Unify Corp, has formed a new subsidiary, Interact, in an attempt to expand its business in the Unix office applications area. The new company starts life with five employees, and will focus its business on the Office 2001 project, a tool and development environment developed using Unify and its development language Accell, which links MS-DOS and Unix using four building block modules for sales and customer management and financial and salary control. These modules will be customised according to the requirements of users and source code will be provided to those that want to do their own customisation. The four-module set costs $72,500. Interact attributes the slow permeation of Unix into the business field to the strength of proprietary office computers for specific applications, and the good support provided by office computer dealers. It hopes to counter both by increasing the number of applications and value-added resellers. Interact hopes to do $3.2m of business the the first year of operations. Unify Corp is now battling with Oracle Corp for top place in the Japanese market, where the relative standings of the various relational database products are different from those in other countries. The president of Air, Mr Kitayama, attributes Unify’s success to its early start in the Japanese market, with a localised product. Back in 1982, Air was developing its own multi-user database system, but to reduce the time to market, decided to seek a distribution arrangement with a US company. Since Informix Software Inc was already tied up with Ascii Corp, and Ingres Corp found the fledgling Air too small to be interesting, Air made an agreement with Unify, one which Unify Corp could not subsequently have complained about since Air went about briskly signing OEM agreements with Sumitomo Electric Co, which at that time – in 1983 – was the only Unix workstation provider. That was followed by OEM agreements with NCR Japan Ltd in 1985, NEC Corp in 1986, and Hitachi Ltd in 1988. Hitachi has since become Air’s biggest customer, selling Unify OEM on its Unix 2050 business workstations under the name DBMS5 – although it is now beginning to sell under the Unify name. Total annual sales of Unify/Accell in 1991 amounted to 37,000 units, bringing the cumulative base to around 100,000 units. Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp is the largest Unify user in Japan.
