After 18 months or so of co-development, Fulcrum Technologies Inc and Fujitsu Ltd are forming a Japanese joint venture company to market a Japanese-language version of Fulcrum’s Search Server search and retrieval engine. Nihon Fulcrum KK, as it will be known, is 70% owned by Ottawa, Canada-based Fulcrum, with the rest held by Fujitsu and the $900,000 invested by the pair reflects that split. The company will begin selling the new product at the start of next month from its Tokyo headquarters. The deal is non-exclusive, but the company itself will have exclusive rights to market the technology in Japan. Fujitsu, still plugging away at the groupware market with TeamWare, is to integrate the Japanese SearchServer technology into TeamWare, to Web-enable it and enhance it’s Japanese- language capabilities. Fulcrum CEO Eric Goodwin reckons the new engine has all the Japanese bases covered, including such idiosyncracies as multiple characters with the exact same meaning. He said this deal will probably lead to other Asian language versions, given Fujitsu’s muscle in that area of the world. The joint venture is very small to start with: in the four or five range, as Goodwin put it. Goodwin said he expects the Japanese market to be explosive over the next few years. At the end of this fiscal, Fulcrum’s CFO Peter Reid said he expected Asia/Pacific revenues to account for between five and ten per cent of the total, but the company expected that to rise to 20% in the next three years, according to Goodwin.
