Japan loves Red Hat. At this very moment, hordes of Japanese IT folks are angling for the meishi of their favorite Red Hat salesperson, hoping to do business with the number-one rated IT vendor in Japan, two years running, according to Nikkei Market Access' 2008 survey of 3,000 IT workers.
Last year, Nikkei Market Access surveyed 800 Japanese IT workers, and Red Hat came out on top (with Apple Japan and Willcom coming in second and third, respectively). This year, with 2,200 more IT workers surveyed, Red Hat still won with 32.6 percent of the vote. Second place went to Oracle Japan with 30.7 percent of the vote, third place to e-mobile with 29.8 percent, fourth place to VMWare with 28.8 percent, and fifth place to KDDI with 27.8 percent.
Interesting, no? The second and third-place finishers changed completely, but Red Hat remained on top. The Japanese seem pretty consistent in favoring Red Hat.
Tomoyasu Suzuki
(Credit: Plat'Home)I had the chance to do a question-and-answer session with Tomoyasu Suzuki, president and co-founder of Plat'Home. Plat'Home makes a cool palm-sized Linux server, and is one of the early drivers of Japan's Linux market.
Suzuki, a graduate of Tokyo University, co-founded Plat'Home in 1993 and eventually took the reins as CEO in 2000, the same year it IPO'd in Japan. He has a wealth of experience pushing Linux into developing markets, making it a real treat to get some of his time for this Q&A:
Asay: After generating several billion dollars in value in two different satellite company IPOs in Japan in the early 1990s, you turned to energies to building a Linux company. Why?
... Read moreSuzuki: Satellites and entertainment are certainly big business and continue to grow. Those were early days in the Japanese satellite industry, and it was exciting to be involved.
But, ultimately, I believe the opportunity for Linux expanding into a wide range of devices, including, of course, entertainment devices like set-top boxes, cell phones, and other mobile devices, radically dwarfs the opportunity for broadcast entertainment. Even today, when you search, when you make a phone call, when you do online banking, you're using Linux. And it's only the beginning. I wanted to be a part of that.
(Credit:
Worldtravels.com)
For years I've assumed that Japan is not a big contributor to open source. My first real open source-related job was in embedded Linux, which saw plenty of big electronics OEMs using Linux (e.g., Sony, Matsushita, etc.), but not really doing anything in the way of contributing to open-source software.
It's perhaps time to rethink that notion.
I talked with Jesse Casman and Craig Oda of PageOne PR upon their return from Japan and got a very different picture on the Japanese open-source market. There's Takashi Iwai, for example, currently one of the top-10 contributors to the Linux kernel. And then there's Yukihiro ("Matz") Matsumoto, the chief designer of the Ruby programming language, of course. There's Plat'Home, the company that introduced Linux in Japan in 1993 (yes, 1993!), did a successful IPO in Japan in 2000, and currently ships microservers based on their own mix of Linux and BSD that fit in the palm of your hand. There's Turbolinux and Miracle Linux, as well.
But there's even more, more that I never would have guessed.
... Read moreSugarCRM is pulling out both barrels in Japan, announcing today that it has signed an agreement with Softbank Technology to distribute SugarCRM solutions in Japan, including as an ASP/hosted service.
This is exciting news, as relationships are key to cracking the conservative Japanese market, and Softbank Technology (along with existing partner CareBrains) is a great channel into Japan.
But the real news is in who SugarCRM beat to get Softbank's nod:
... Read moreI used to work for a large Japanese company. I know how particular Japanese customers can be. That's why it's impressive to see a US software vendor topping the list of Japan's preferred IT vendors. Even better that the company is an open-source vendor: Red Hat.
Nikkei did a survey of 800 IT buyers in Japan and Red Hat came out on top. Only Apple came close:
... Read more
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