JustSystems in Flux?
March 8, 2010
I received a call about JustSystems, the Japanese company that figured out how to enter complex characters using a three digit code from a mobile phone keypad. A deal with a large mobile device company was the firm’s go-to revenue stream. With changes in mobile technology, that revenue began to dwindle. JustSystems turned to software development and consulting, which are difficult businesses to scale. When I visited the company for my key fob I noted that the firm had more than 500 employees in several locations. The information I reviewed this morning suggested that JustSystems had about 900 employees at the end of 2009.
The firm was of interest to me. I received a Japanese dinner and a key fob after giving a briefing to the company’s owners four or five years ago. I also reported in my story “JustSystems ConceptBase” that the company rolled out a search appliance in some sort of tie up with IBM.
I dug through my files and noticed a data point that I wanted to surface. In April 2009, JustSystems became a subsidiary of the Keyence Corporation. (Asiajin reported this story in April 2009.) Keyence makes a wide range of electronic gizmos. JustSystems pushed into search and content processing, purchasing a US content processing company called Clairvoyance, founded by wizard Dr. David A Evans. The push did not work and the company turned to Keyence, which bought 43.96 percent of JustSystems, valued at a about US$50 million. Six months later in 2009, the founders–Kazunori Ukigawa and Hatsuko Ukigawa, a husband and wife team—resigned as chairman and vice chairperson and quit the Board of Directors. Mrs. Unkgawa was one of the most visible female Japanese company heads in a very male Japanese technology sector.
On Friday, I was able to speak to a customer support representative on the firm’s North American hot line. I was not able to get much information about the status of the products, particularly the search appliance. I asked about the office in Pittsburgh, where Clairvoyance was located. I learned that the Pittsburgh office had been closed.
JustSystems is hosting Webinars and publicizing that it is one of the 100 firms identified as a “company that matters” by the prestigious, widely read KMWorld Magazine. The company lists as its customers, Amazon, Thomson, Symantec, Cisco, WIPO, Jaguar, and other high profile firms.
The company’s flagship product is XMetal and the firm offers a “maturity model” for an enterprise “semantic ecosystem.”
Several observations:
- JSERI–the original Claritech – Clairvoyance – JustSystems Evans Research–seems to have shut down. See drakesbaycompany.com/documents/JSERI_ExecSummary.pdf
- The USPTO published in November 2009 US, “Methods and Apparatus for Interactive Document Clustering.” The assignee is JustSystems Evans Research. The Wikipedia entry is here.
- There is no search function on the company’s English language Web site. A quick look at the Japanese site and I was not able to locate a search function. When I search Keyence’s Web site for the ConceptBase I got zero hits. Maybe the appliance is a goner?
To sum up, I don’t know if the ConceptBase appliance is currently for sale. I will keep poking around.
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I did get paid to go to Tokyo to get my JustSystems key fob. I suppose that counts for something.
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
