Mr Takahashi, Senior Managing Director of Nippon Steel Data Communications System, a subsidiary of Nippon Steel Corp created three years ago, concentrated his discussion on issues confronted by Nippon Steel in the implementation of more open systems – including centralised versus decentralised processing, data repository, the poor maintainability of C language code, differences between the various versions of Unix, and the processing power gap between mainframes and workstations. Nippon Steel has standardised on the use of Oracle around the company, and recently reinforced this with its investment in Oracle Japan. Finally a Sigma System manager, Mr Goto, outlined the results of the survey conducted jointly by Sigma System and X/Open Co Ltd, and based on a sample of 251 users; these are being published as part of the Xtra Report. While the report showed that increasing numbers of Japanese users expected in the future to move towards distributed systems and away from centralised processing, with a decreasing proportion of single vendor systems and more integrated applications, the Japanese preference was still overwhelmingly in favour of in-house or contracted development of application software, rather than the use of packages. Reasons such as making more effective use of existing software and technical staff through development, and the lack of good packages, were cited. The symposium concluded with a panel discussion which raised the issue of responsibility in multivendor system building, and suggested that there was business to be made in being a system integrator who could undertake such work on behalf of Japanese users, who compared with users in the West, have been relatively mollycoddled and manipulated by the hardware vendors. – Anita Byrnes
