Fujitsu Stakes BPM Claim In North America

Fujitsu, which made its name in consumer electronics but has a software and services business with almost $17 billion in annual revenue, is taking its act to North America. On Tuesday the company released the latest generation of its Interstage Suite, an application infrastructure software solution for designing, developing and managing scalable, customized mission-critical applications. Designed to facilitate the management of processes and content and support Web services, Interstage Suite is being targeted at businesses of all sizes, primarily in the financial services, manufacturing and health-care sectors.

Interstage has been available in Asia for some time, but for various cultural and business reasons it's more often sold there as a complete product suite. Here it's more likely to be sold in components, and it will have particular appeal to the SMB space.

"It's aimed at small and midsize companies that have huge amounts of data but don't have the tools to manage it," says Keith Swenson, chief architect for the company's U.S. Interstage division.

The new version includes enhancements to the solution's XML Search capabilities and eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) processor toolkit, as well as upgrades to its Business Process Manager (BPM) software and Interstage Portal, all designed to streamline an organization's BPM capabilities and address issues brought on by legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley and other new laws.

But here's the rub: Fujitsu's channel program is nascent, at best. It currently has OEM partners such as Sybase and SSA, and company officials say they intend to slowly ramp up its indirect channel presence. But they also are earmarking much of the Interstage revenue for the company's own multibillion-dollar services division, so the average VAR won't have much of an opportunity to work with the new offering.

What this means is that VARs in the BPM space suddenly have a formidable and well-financed competitor. Robert Sepanloo, general manager of Fujistu's Interstage division, says Interstage's primary challenge comes from Oracle, IBM and "a lot of niche players." Swenson says the company will be looking to add systems integrators to help the product suite get established in North America.

"Some of them will want to resell it, and some will take more of an influencer role," he says. "We'll look at tier-one and tier-two integrators who map out regionally or can help us in a vertical market."

With revenue for Interstage coming in at about $7.5 million this year and projected to hit $25 million to $30 million in 2004 and $100 million in 2005, Fujitsu clearly has big plans for the Suite. The question is, how big of a bite this might take out of the BPM channel.