While its parent back home in Mountain View struggles with its growing pains and the myriad problems of success, Nippon Sun MicroSystems held an overwhelmingly successful Sun Application Fair at the end of last month, Anita Byrnes reports. A Sun source said modestly that the high attendance, of over 11,000, surprised even Nippon Sun. Over 70 companies exhibited, including the company’s major Japanese OEM customers such as Toshiba Corp, Fujitsu Ltd, C Itoh & Co’s CI Techno-Science, and Nippon Steel, backed up by other companies selling both hardware and a range of software packages, many of which are Japanese versions of tools and applications originally developed outside Japan. A stand that attracted considerable attention was that of Nippon Timeshare, the new distributor for Relational Technology Inc’s Sybase relational database. Three sales of Sybase have already been made to large Japanese financial institutions following its release in June, even though the Japanese version of Sybase will not be available until March next year (with a beta test version hitting the market in December 1989). Another newly released package in Japan is the Empress relational database developed by Empress Software Inc of Canada and distributed by MKC Corp. Other software that attracted the attention of attendees included artificial intelligence tools such as Nexpert, which is marketed for Sun workstations by Overseas Bechtel Corp, and IXLA, an artificial intelligence development language for Unix workstations that was originally developed by Intelligent Systems Research Pty Ltd of Melbourne, Australia and sold by CI Techno-Sales, another C Itoh subsidiary. Computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering applications are perennially popular in technically-oriented Japan and Nissho Electronics with its newly-Japanised version of VersaCAD; MetalCAD, distributed by Shinagawa Corp in Japan; ProEngineer from Parametric Technology Corp, distributed by Tokyo Electron; and three dimensional computer-aided design package Solution 3000 from Famotik were all on display. Sun holds a 20% share of the Japanese workstation market, amounted to only 33,000 units in total last year but is forecast to double to about 60,000 this year, and price cutting has begun with Sony Corp, which also has 20% of the market, reducing its 1850 and 711 stations by between 22% and 25% last month. The merged Hewlett-Packard-Apollo Computer is the new market leader, with a combined 25% share last year.
