Fujitsu Ltd. is about to make a push to get some new informatics products into the U.S. market.
Fujitsu is not well known in the U.S., in general, and most definitely not well known in the informatics community. But that perception is both wrong and about to change.
The company has a long history in developing informatics applications. Its work in the field goes back over 20 years, when it started helping a pharmaceutical customer that had bought Fujitsu computing hardware. “That legacy started the whole program,” said Michael J. McManus, a consultant to Fujitsu America Inc.
Over the years, Fujitsu built an internal group of systems engineers and software developers. The focus in Japan was to provide a complete hardware and software solution to its life science customers. “The company combines hardware with software that is written and tuned to run on that hardware,” said McManus.
McManus noted that Fujitsu is an engineering company whose visibility could be greater — especially in the informatics arena.
For instance, many people do not know that the company owns the quantum mechanics computational chemistry program MOPAC and the computer-aided chemistry modeling software package CAChe, both of which are resold and widely used in the U.S. Additionally, Fujitsu has several other informatics tools that are currently bundled in with third-party informatics applications being sold mainly in Japan and Europe.
Over the last few months, McManus has been doing market research for Fujitsu to gauge the interest of the life science community in various informatics product areas. Over that time, he’s spoken with about 50 companies and he said he is seeing interest in the software Fujitsu already sells in Japan.
For example, Fujitsu has an application called GeneSphere, which is a genomics application that helps biologists classify lists of expressed genes by their function and where they are located within the cell.