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Naoyuki Baba, Vice President
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Daniel Fanger, Co-Founder
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GrapeCity: The Bullet Train Personified
The company's diverse portfolio has a singular underpinning—a commitment to efficiency and excellence.
by Peggy Aycinena
February 14, 2006
When it comes to a diversified portfolio, GrapeCity—founded in 1980 in Sendai, Japan—takes the cake, everything from educational management software to recording studios. Yet, the company's product diversity comes not through acquisitions, but out of a set of serial decisions to move into new markets, thoughtfully and one by one.
GrapeCity's story, while a classic study in careful growth and steady attention to the details of customer relationships and quality product offerings, is also a somewhat unlikely one.
In the late 1970's, a group of educators founded two private kindergartens in Sendai, 300 kilometers north of Tokyo. Within a year, they found themselves overwhelmed with the record keeping and bookkeeping requirements associated with their enterprise. Not surprisingly, they decided to purchase a computer to solve the problem, but once procured, they couldn't find any commercially available software in Japan or the U.S. to load onto their DOS-based computer that would meet their needs.
Instead, they took several of their teachers and sent them off to be trained as programmers. Within a few months, the teachers-turned-programmers developed a software package specific to the administrative needs of the two schools. Not only did the newly developed software successfully handle payroll, tuition payments, and student academic records, it also helped the administration address the strict governmental reporting obligations imposed on all private schools within Japan.
By 1980, the school administrators realized they had an authentic business opportunity on their hands. Why not package the software and sell it commercially? As it was not possible to sell software and keep that effort separate from the management of the schools, GrapeCity the company was launched. Today, the current version of GrapeCity's educational management software is the de-facto standard in Japan, in use in more than 2500 of the 10,000 private schools across the country.
But, there's more to the story.
As they overcame the learning hurdle with regards to developing, installing and marketing their own software, the management at GrapeCity decided to branch out into a different, albeit related market. In scanning the choices of products to meet their immediate development needs, the founders of GrapeCity noticed there were few Windows programming tools available in Japan—yet there was a huge demand.
At the same time, they saw a wealth of development tools coming out of the prolific Windows-based community in North America, and quickly recognized a second, significant business opportunity. GrapeCity decided to extend their portfolio of offerings into the services-centric area of software localization.
The company did not go at that effort lightheartedly. Naoyuki Baba, GrapeCity vice president, says, "For us, localization has always gone far beyond simply translating the English documentation into Japanese. The process has also included extensive testing and debugging of the software. Any product that is going to succeed in the Japanese market has to be completely stable!" he insists. "GrapeCity helps tool vendors certify that stability."
In fact, Baba reports that over the many years of localizing a wide range of Windows development tools for Japan, as many as 500 bugs have been found at a time in a single software application, and reported back to the tool vendor to be addressed and resolved. The resolution of software bugs is mandatory for any vendor who would have GrapeCity continue on with the process of offering a tool into the Japanese market.
As a result of their exacting standards, Baba says the company is now proud to hold the dominant market share in Japan, providing the premier localization service for development tools coming into the country—from a variety of global sources now, not just North America—and assuring the quality of third-party software deployed at some of the largest user locations nationwide.
Companies like Toshiba and Hitachi, according to Baba, trust GrapeCity to prepare the tools—to thoroughly "localize" the tools—and to guarantee that the products meet the extraordinarily high standards that savvy vendors know to be the hallmark of the Japanese user community.
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